Hell Is Real

But Misunderstood

The True Story of My Life Changing Journey to Hell and Back

Dr. Xavier K. R.

Hell is Real: But Misunderstood

The True Story of My Life Changing Journey To Hell and Back

A work of non-fiction by Dr. Xavier K.R.

Copyright 2013, XKR Publishing.

All Rights Reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1492331919

ISBN-10: 1492331910

Portions of this book have been previously serialized.

Cover Art by Samuel Micah Johnson.

Featuring Paintings of William Blake:

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun

&

Ancient of Days

This book may not be replicated, republished, distributed, or used in any way to make a profit. For more information or to receive permission to use this book for educational purposes please contact: DoctorXavierKR@Gmail.com

“If you're going through Hell, keep going.”

~Sir Winston Churchill

“Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.”

~Mark Twain

“Hell is other people.”

~Jean-Paul Sartre

Table of Contents

Introduction 7

Chapter 1 : Questions of Faith 10

Chapter 2 : Hell & Lawyers 13

Chapter 3 : Mortality 16

Chapter 4 : This is Your Brain on Death 22

Chapter 5 : My Death 35

Chapter 6 : The Journey Begins 41

Chapter 7 : Was That Real? 47

Chapter 8 : Welcome to Hell 49

Chapter 9 : We Make Our Own Hell 54

Chapter 10 : All Apologies 58

Chapter 11 : Revelations 63

Chapter 12 : Which Sins Matter? 66

Chapter 13 : Vivisection 71

Chapter 14 : The Inconvenient Implications 75

Chapter 15 : God Is Greater Than Religion 79

Chapter 16 : The Shrinking Church 91

Chapter 17 : Final Thoughts 96

Introduction

I used to be an Agnostic. I didn't know that there was a God or a Heaven or a Hell. I suspected that their was probably a creator of some kind, and that perhaps something like a soul might be able to live on after our deaths, but beyond that I would not have claimed to be a Theist.

So when I died, went to Hell, then came back to life with a message that Hell is real, you can imagine the surprise of the people who knew me.

When word of my revelation reached the people at a certain publishing company, I was approached to write a book. “An Atheist doctor who sees Hell and converts is a Godsend, an absolute dream come true, and a cash cow,” I was told by the President of this publisher. But when I sat down with her and explained what I saw, she suddenly lost interest and the book deal died.

Why?

After several unreturned calls, I finally got a response: “Nobody wants to hear that they're wrong about Hell.”

I tried to assure her that my message is a positive one. I'm not coming back to Earth to tell everyone that they're damned. I'm coming back to say that we've misunderstood Hell, and that I know what it's really like and what it's really for.

“That's not my Hell,” she said before hanging up.

I had been approached by a Christian-Literature book agent who wanted badly to sign me. He told me how I was guaranteed to hit the best-seller lists with the story of an Agnostic converting. He told me about several people who had approached him with stories of seeing Heaven and wanting a book deal. There's a market for it, and so there are people jumping to write books like this. This agent had gotten book deals for two such people. When I gave him an outline of my book he came back to me and told me rather non-chalantly to change it. “No no no, people don't want their beliefs challenged. These books are simple, you tell a nice fuzzy story about seeing Jesus, throw in something about seeing somebody that's been dead for years in Heaven and you're gold.” I told him I wasn't going to change my story. He told me that if I wanted to get on the best-seller list, that I should listen to him, his other clients did and it worked for them.

I won't name names, but suffice it to say, that there are books by people claiming to have seen Heaven who are absolutely making up their stories, changing them when told to by editors, publishers, and agents who want to maximize the profits.

I don't think all people claiming to have had Near-Death-Experiences are liars or that all people who claim to have been to Heaven are just trying to make a buck. But many of them do seem to behave as if they are only in it for the money.

I have self-published this book myself, doing all of the writing myself (more than once I was told to work with a ghost-writer, no pun intended), editing it myself, and doing everything myself. There's no ad campaign, no billboards, no appearances on talk shows or radio shows. It's just me. And I'm publishing both as an eBook and as a paperback (no expensive hardback) and for low prices because I want this message to get out.

So if you haven't heard of me or my story in the mainstream press, or any press at all, it's because I've opted not to have a ghost writer to spice up my story, not to edit out important details to make the story more palatable to more people, not to become the mass-market product that agents, and publishers wanted me to become, and ultimately not to change the my message.

Chapter 1 : Questions of Faith

I'm a skeptical person. I tend not to believe anything unless given very compelling evidence and working logically through it. This led me to being an adult with no religious conviction. And yet, I've come to believe that Heaven and Hell are real. While my new found beliefs have ostracized me from many friends who can't wrap their heads around my new beliefs, I've not exactly been embraced by the religious community either.

You might think that an Agnostic doctor having a near death experience and coming back to proclaim that he saw a real literal Hell would be embraced by mainstream religion as proof of their faiths. Well, if you're reading this book hoping to have your pre-conceived notions confirmed, I've got more bubbles to pop and more people to turn away from me.

Yes. I saw Hell. I've been there. However, it's not the Hell you've been told about. In fact, Hell is completely misunderstood. It's not as bad as you think it is. Really. I've been there, I was tortured there...but it's not so bad.

I've been to Hell and back and the message I have to carry is not one that is liked by skeptics or the scientific community, nor is it liked by the religious community because my message doesn't sit well with the preachers, pastors, and popes (we do have more than one pope at the moment).

But religious figures should like my ideas. I think my revelation actually clears up a lot of serious problems in religious dogma, and actually answers many of the common criticisms of religion levied by atheists and agnostics. Many of the problems I saw with religion that led me to agnosticism are now answered and accounted for.

If you're reading this book to hear about a lake of fire littered with homosexuals, I'm afraid that you're not going to be happy. God doesn't hate fags. In fact, God does not hate. But how can God make a Hell to torture people and not hate them? I believe I have that answer.

For centuries people have asked serious philosophical questions. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why would God punish anyone for an eternity? Are there any sins worth eternal torture?

Some have famously asked things like: Why does God allow Evil to exist? If he can't prevent Evil, then he is not all-powerful. If he can prevent it, but doesn't, he's not benevolent. If he's neither benevolent nor omnipotent, then why call him God?

I couldn't understand how God could send people to Hell simply because they weren't the exact right denomination.

I couldn't understand why God would torture anyone forever for temporary sins.

Questions like these led me to abandon the faith in which I was raised and to become an Agnostic in my teens and twenties, a state that persisted well into my forties, right up into the journey that this book is about.

Having been to Hell, having gone on the journey, I have come to satisfactory answers for all of the questions of faith I used to have. Ultimately, my journey has cleared up all of these questions because the questions themselves are based on an incorrect picture of the universe, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what Hell is and what it is for.

My ultimate message is a positive one, and one that for many will re-affirm their faith. However it will not be embraced by religious institutions because my message will contradict teachings of many organized religions. I simply ask that you read with an open mind.

Chapter 2 : Hell & Lawyers

Before all of this happened, I did not believe in a literal Hell. I wasn't sure about a literal Heaven either. I suspected that a Heaven might exist, but I was sure, POSITIVE even, that there was no real Hell.

I was raised Christian but was never very devout. In college I came to the conclusion that religions were the products of fallible humans. There are so many different denominations, how could you choose the right one? They all have their idiosyncrasies, and they all seem to have their flaws. Most people simply stay in the denomination they were born in, or they convert when marrying. I mean how often do you hear of a Catholic suddenly deciding that they'd rather be Baptist?

How to pick the correct one? It occurred to me that none of them were the “correct” one. God isn't reachable by checking a box on a checklist. The few experiences I'd had that led me to believe in a God were all of an almost mystical nature. They were really feelings more than anything. A feeling of connection to something more, something greater, bigger, wiser, more profound, something incomprehensible, but most of all, a loving presence. That connection transcends denomination, it doesn't care if you speak in tongues or if you say your “hail Mary's” or if you work on a Sunday.

When I finished my undergraduate education at the ripe old age of 22, I would have called myself an Agnostic. I believed that there may be a God, but not necessarily the God of the Bible or the Qur’an, but a loving, nurturing, non-judgmental creator. I felt this God's presence in those fleeting moments of perfection we have through our lives like when I first knew I truly loved the woman that would become my wife. I sat with my father at his death bed and felt a cosmic connection with him, knowing I would see him again and seeing in his eyes that he was ready to go and it was a welcome end. In moments like that, I felt like I was in the presence of a greater existence, a cosmic force, a profound nature that couldn't be simply explained.

My God was a simple one. It created the universe and watched from a distance. Occasionally, rarely, too infrequently, we could glimpse the nature of God and that manifested as a connection we feel to the cosmic, to ancient forces, to the future, to something deeper that we can normally understand. That was my God. Not a God that particularly cared if you were Gay or had sex before you were married or if you prayed or even believed. My God wasn't a God that needed you to believe in him. He would love you in those moments and try to give you comfort at the end. But for the most part he wasn't really involved. And no church, no religious institution, nor any televangelist could speak for that God.

I know people who have a checklist of requirements for getting into Heaven. How do you know these things? Do you really think such a grand and elegant God is just going to go off of a checklist? Wouldn't he be capable of reading infinitely deeply into your soul to see your true nature and no amount of brown-nosing could possibly make up for it? There are those that believe in death-bed conversions, that even Adolph Hitler himself could have been Heaven-bound if he had said the right words before dying. I can't possibly believe that. Whenever you try to codify the mystical, you turn God into a petulant lawyer, and trust me, if there's a God, he's not a lawyer. Could you imagine all the red-tape in a Lawyer-God universe? Good grief.

Before my journey, I believed that there was perhaps a Heaven, but not a city-in-the-clouds as it's often depicted, but something more ephemeral, where perhaps our life-energy would go and we would all return to the cosmic collection of life energies from whence we came. It couldn't just be like a vacation where we still exist as we exist on Earth, getting to eat whatever we want and ride roller coasters or whatever it is we do for all of eternity. Surely on a long enough time-line we would all grow bored of even the best vacation. So my universe was one where we maybe got to live on in some small way as some warm ball of energy in some other dimension. But I KNEW for sure that there was not a literal Hell where we would be tortured for eternity. Of course not. That's silly. That's a scary story we tell kids and troubled youth to scare them straight. What God would feel the need to torture anyone for an eternity? For what purpose? Surely being a jerk for a few years doesn't earn you eternal torture.

But my views now are completely different. My universe has changed.

Hell is real.

It is a real place, and I've seen it. You might want to turn your air conditioning up, because you're about to feel the heat. . .

Chapter 3 : Mortality

I'm a medical doctor. I spent my twenties in medical school learning how the human body works, and perhaps more importantly, how it doesn't work. I hate to shatter the bubble you might live in, but your body could stop working any moment. It's a miracle that we ever live in the first place. You probably feel like you are you. That is, you, the conscious being, is the body you inhabit. But really, most of your body is only a few years old, even if you're in your forties. The body is constantly being replaced, cells age and die and are replaced. So after a few years, almost nothing in your body will be the same material that was in your body years earlier. But you feel a continuous existence. You might not like to think about it, but much of your body mass is made of bacteria and little organisms that are alive and separate from you. A human body is an entire ecosystem, and it really only takes one thing going wrong for the entire thing to come crashing down.

Being a doctor, you realize just how mechanical and not cosmic the human body really is. To many doctors, putting a body part in front of them is like putting a car in front of an auto-mechanic. It's a mechanical system, and things break. Thankfully our bodies do a better job of fixing themselves than BMWs do, but when our bodies can't figure out how to fix themselves, we're really in trouble, and all the king's doctor's and all the king's men probably won't do much good.

It's hard to meet someone and then see the life drain out of them until they are little more than a pile of meat on a table. It's hard to think about life the same way after you do this job. In our modern society, we're extremely detached from our own mortality. I would say that most people have never seen someone die or even seen a dead body that hasn't been made-up and prepared for burial. It shakes you to your core when you watch a person go from being alive, thinking, breathing, feeling to being a corpse in the matter of just seconds. Sometimes it's easy, and they pass in their sleep. But sometimes it's downright brutal. Some people die screaming. Others die in an instant of violent collisions, their brains ripped to shreds by bullets or their bodies smashed to pieces by uncaring automobiles.

Our society is so detached from death it's really concerning. We go to war, we drop bombs, we deploy drones, and yet we rarely confront the results of those actions. We're desensitized to violence by movies and games and think we know what death is. But actually witnessing a person die is a completely jarring experience if you're not accustomed to it, as so few of us are. I believe that a lack of exposure to death makes for a population that is ill-equipped to truly contemplate their actions.

I swear if we took every teenager in the world and made them look at the results of a head-on collision in which a whole family had been extinguished because the other driver was texting, you would never have another texting-and-driving accident. Then again, they'd probably quit texting-and-driving for a few months until the experience of seeing bones sticking through skin, puddles of blood, and bits of skull embedded in the upholstery had dulled in their fading memories. We'd probably need to make people see these things on a weekly basis to really keep them in line.

I used to be the doctor that was brought in to the scenes of accidents and crimes to declare someone to be deceased. It's a bit of a useless job really, since the only time they bring in the doctor to declare someone dead is after they basically make completely sure that the person is dead, otherwise they're rushed via ambulance to an ER. If there's any doubt at all, they treat the person, even if they're pretty sure the person will be dead on arrival. The only ones that remain at the scene are the ones that are so obviously broken machines in such a state that the first responders can't even think about them as people anymore, but instead they block out those thoughts and compartmentalize their feelings by seeing the broken corpse as “evidence” and not a human being.

Spend a couple of weeks doing that job and I guarantee you you won't be the same person anymore.

People often talk about miracles. The miracle of birth, the miracle of a bus full of kids crashing but nobody dying, the miracle of a person with cancer surviving. I have to confess that I don't think these are miracles. Because for every bus that rolls off a road and manages to miraculously miss falling into a canyon and all the little kids get to walk out unscathed, there's a child that won't see his or her sixth birthday because mom was talking on the phone and trying to take an on-ramp too fast because she was a few minutes late and rolled the SUV and the little girl was ejected because the car-seat harness was too loose and she landed head first on the pavement and caved in her skull. It's easy to thank God when someone happens to be unharmed, but when you have to inspect the caved in skull of a five year old girl, it's hard to think any God could exist unless It simply didn't care about us. The last thing you want to know is the little girl's name. But that was my job for several years. I had to fill out the form. I'd fill in her full name, her date of birth, cause of death, time of death. I did eventually grow numb to it, but it's never easy to write down the birthday of an already dead person and have it seem so recent as to be almost an inconsequential amount of time. Whatever the date is when you read this, simply subtract five years and imagine having to write that down on a death certificate. It's hard to imagine someone born in 2008 already having lived their whole life. But that's the world we live in.

Having worked such a job, you can probably imagine my worldview. It'd be nice to think that a perfect after-life awaits us all and that the little Shelby's and Makayla's and Kieran's and Harrison's are already in Heaven and living a wonderful warm existence in the embrace of a loving God. But having seen the terrible reality of death, it became extremely hard for me to believe that such a loving God could be so wonderful to us in the after-life if he's this horrible or indifferent to us in this life. They say the Lord works in mysterious ways. I fail to see the mystery. Mom or Dad was driving too fast, not paying enough attention, or the gun wasn't properly unloaded and locked up, or the party was just too much fun to quit drinking after ten shots of tequila. It's rarely a mystery. My wife likes watching crime and mystery shows. I hate to burst yet another bubble, but those things are really fake. Most of the time there is very little mystery at all. People die all the time and for obvious and stupid reasons.

There's a best-selling book out right now about a person who had a near-death-experience and had a vision of Heaven. Actually there are several books like that. I read one a few years ago when it came out. A boy claimed to have been to Heaven and even met Jesus. I was skeptical. Part of me wanted to believe that it could be true, but that doctor in me wouldn't quite let me forget the things I've seen first hand. In the book, the boy explains that the Jesus he met even had the crucifixion wounds, and he described the wounds in detail. This is a very young boy and quite a compelling story. But in his description, he says that wounds are on Jesus's palms. In popular culture and in many works of art, this is how Jesus is depicted, with nails through the palms. However, I can tell you that it is physically impossible to crucify someone by putting a nail through the palms. The bones in the hand will not hold and the nail will rip its way through the side of the hand. I have seen up close that hands can quite easily be torn apart, though I've never actually seen crucifixion wounds. In reality, the nail has to be driven through the forearm, between the radius and the ulna. It's actually the radius, the bone connecting the elbow-joint to the wrist on the thumb-side of your hand, that bears the weight, and that bone is usually going to be strong enough to support that much weight.

So when the boy claims to have met Jesus and remembers clear details that we know to be wrong, it casts doubt across the whole story. It's hard to say with 100% certainty what happened. Perhaps the boy did go to Heaven and did meet Jesus, but remembered some details wrong. Or perhaps it was all just a dream, influenced by his pre-existing ideas of Heaven and Jesus. Or perhaps his pastor father saw dollar signs when his son came-to.

It makes sense that someone would dream up the Jesus they know from popular culture and not a different Jesus. Another account of a near-death-experience describes Jesus as a white man with long brown hair. It's almost certainly true that Jesus did not look like he appears in most modern depictions, but rather would have appeared more “Middle Eastern,” with a darker complexion. Kids also have dreams about Santa Claus, but we don't rush to the presses to say that the North Pole is real. Well... bad example.

When you deal with death on a regular basis, unable to ignore the reality of it, without the luxury of a rosy vision of life, it makes it much harder to believe in miracles or a caring god.

And that's what happened to me.

Chapter 4 : This is Your Brain on Death

The near-death-experience (NDE) has been a mystery for millenia. NDEs usually involve some or all of the following aspects:

1. Feeling as if you are outside of your own body. Also called “Out-of-Body-Experience” or OOBE.

2. A peaceful experience with positive feelings of well-being.

3. A sense of being dead or removed from the world.

4. A feeling of powerful and unconditional love.

5. An experience of moving forward through a tunnel or passageway.

6. A visual light-show of bright colors, but often very bright whites, often including beings made of light or otherwise very bright.

These effects are often interpreted by those experiencing a NDE to believe that they have actually left their bodies, ascended in some way to Heaven and seen angels or even Jesus or God. While the visions often differ greatly, the most prevalent reporting is of the feeling of unconditional love.

The NDE is an ancient phenomena, with documentation going back as far as a description of such a near-death-experience in Plato's Republic from the 4th century B.C.

The fact that people all over the world share a common experience in the moments near death provide a good explanation for the prevalence of heavenly after-lifes in religions and mythologies across the planet and stretching back in time for thousands of years. It can be argued that the NDE is one of the very rare ways in which mortal humans can glimpse something immortal, seeing into the void after death, and thus perhaps what is happening is that people are actually glimpsing a real Heaven.

This does not then mean that this Heaven is any one particular Heaven. Even if it were proven that people having NDEs were glimpsing a real Heaven, it wouldn't then mean that Christianity is correct or Islam is correct, because these experiences have been had all over the world by people of many faiths. If anything, this commonality probably means that the NDE is not supernatural, but is rather the result of something physically happening in the brain. After all, if people of all faiths can see their gods in their NDEs, then that doesn't really play into any one religion. Just as Christians claim to have seen Jesus (even if Jesus has anatomically incorrect crucifixion wounds and the wrong skin color), Muslims have seen Muhammed, Hindus have seen Vishnu, and so on. So if anything, the NDE is only proof of a loving after-life that is willing to present you with a comforting transition and will show you whichever God you might expect to run into when you get there to make your transition easier. So is this a supernatural Heaven in some other dimension where our souls go to and the only evidence we can possibly have of its existence is the experiences of those who nearly went there but were somehow saved and returned to Earth to tell the tale?

Again, I saw this NDE as proof of a loving God, but not a specific Christian God or any other God, and this Heaven's openness to people of different faiths seemed to fit my understanding of a God without checklists.

However, modern scientific and medical understanding of the human body does in fact have a possible explanation for near-death-experiences, and one that does not involve anything at all supernatural.

There is a drug called Dimethyltriptamine, DMT, which has been used by people of South America for thousands of years. It's the active ingredient in a disgusting cocktail called Ayahuasca, but you don't drink it for the flavor. Instead, ingesting DMT can result in the following effects:

1. Out-of-Body-Experience. Feelings of flying or being elsewhere. Even being able to look back at yourself.

2. A peaceful feeling of well-being. Often called Euphoria.

3. Feeling intense love or connection to other people or nature or the universe. Often people coming off of DMT highs explain that they felt “Oneness” of all people and things.

4. A visual light show of hallucinations, often including flying through repeating patterns that sometimes are tunnel-like, but also often called flower-like or fractal.

Do these symptoms sound familiar?

Okay, so perhaps DMT causes hallucinations that are similar to the NDE. What does that mean? Well, depending on your theory of how the mind works, the implications can be very different. For Dualists, they believe the mind to be made of two parts (hence Dual), the physical mind and the spiritual mind or soul if you will. There are many kinds of Dualism. For some, the brain is more like an antenna that taps into the cosmic or supernatural or other dimension where souls exist. These people think of the brain like the antenna on an old TV set, enabling the TV to seem to magically show you images and sound. But the TV is nothing without the source. In modern science, most dismiss dualism since you can't measure or find a physical soul. The bias in modern science is for the measurable and testable, and the soul just doesn't fit that bill. So it's not so much that science says souls don't exist as much as they simply don't say anything about it and try to explain everything with the things they can physically measure.

For the Monist (Mono, single, as in just the brain and not the Dualist's combination of brain and soul), DMT's effects are proof that the brain is perfectly capable giving people a seeming supernatural experience.

But how would it work? Does your body run out to a drug dealer to get DMT while you're on the verge of death?

Well, in the 1990s, Dr. Rick Strassman came up with the hypothesis that a NDE is caused by a release of DMT from within the brain. It seems that the brain actually has it's own supply of the drug, nestled away in the Pineal Gland. The Pineal Gland modulates your sleeping/wakeful patterns. In animals, the Pineal Gland has been found to be involved in hibernation, metabolism, seasonal breeding, and sexual development. So in a way, the Pineal Gland might be thought of as the body's internal clock. And for some reason, your internal clock, which might sound like the most boring part of the body, has a drug cocktail in its cabinet and is waiting to get you high if it senses you are about to die.

This is basically the current scientific understanding of the NDE. When the Pineal Gland senses you are near-death, it releases a dose of DMT directly into your brain, causing hallucinations, feelings of love, warmth, a light show, and causes time to seem to stand still. Often NDEs seem to last for very long periods of time. Some people claim to have seen their entire lives flash before their eyes, but not in the blink of an eye, but rather as a long trip that somehow only takes a fraction of a second. Often the NDE seems to last days and yet the person is unconscious for only a matter of seconds. Since the Pineal Gland is the “internal clock” of the brain, it makes sense that the Pineal Gland would be capable of screwing with your sense of time so dramatically.

And so, for me, a doctor, when talking to other doctors or researches, it's just assumed, just taken for granted, that the mystery has been solved. DMT causes NDEs, it's present in the brain and can account for all of the hallucinations and feelings, and can be replicated by giving people a high dose of DMT. Therefore, mystery solved... right?

Well, not so fast.

It might be mystery solved for the monist, who is satisfied that the physical brain can be prodded with an electrode or dosed with a chemical and the machine can produce the desired result. But for the Dualist, it's not so simple.

Let's go back to the idea of the brain as a Television set, where the soul is the invisible radio wave being captured out of the air by the antenna. The monist can't measure the radio waves carrying the signal, and the insist the Television is somehow creating the wonderful show on the screen. The Dualists insist that the TV can't possibly be creating such wonderful pictures and sounds all by itself. The end result is more than the sum of the parts. In this example, the TV show is akin to consciousness. The Monist says the TV is on and therefore it can produce consciousness. The Dualist insists that the TV can't possibly be creating TV shows out of thin air, but there must be some source of this signal.

We know that the Dualist is right about the TV set because we know about electromagnetic radiation and can measure that radio signal. We can't yet measure or find the soul's signal. But that doesn't mean it's out there.

I postulate a Dualist mind. That is, the Brain is attuned to the soul via some kind of signal or pathway into a supernatural world, perhaps in some other dimension.

If you smash the TV with a hammer, the show goes away. And if you smash a skull, the consciousness goes away, not because that consciousness or that TV show has been destroyed, but because the means of connecting with that signal has been destroyed.

So when you do something like take a hallucinogenic drug, what you're doing is changing the channel on the TV set, communing with a different part of that TV signal.

I now believe that when you nearly die, your soul is going on a real cosmic voyage, and part of this cosmic voyage you experience as a human being is explained by the physical workings of the brain. That is, your everyday experience as a consciousness is a combination of soul and mind, and at some point you must transition from soul-mind-hybrid to simply a soul. And this transition occurs during the process of death. And the typical near-death-experience is the beginning of this process.

Since this process occurs in cooperation between soul and mind, it would make sense that one could find a way to stimulate the mind to get it to do its half of the near-death-experience independently, much as you could tweak the settings on a TV set.

So what I believe is that when you actually die (or nearly die), your brain goes into the death-experience mode which is a process of transition from mind-soul-hybrid to a soul-only existence. In other words, your brain is connecting closer and closer with the soul and opening up your consciousness to make that connection into the spiritual world.

So when you actually die, your brain goes into this death-experience mode, opening you up for this journey, and then you pick up the signal from the after-life and transition into that dimension.

And when you aren't dying, but instead take the drug DMT, you are tricking your brain into entering the death-experience mode. This opens your brain up to make that deeper spiritual connection.

If you look closely at the drug trials of DMT, you'll find many similar symptoms, but not quite all of them, not quite in the same uniformity that you find the experiences of real NDEs. For DMT users, they rarely run into religious figures. They feel loved, they feel spiritual connections and oneness with the universe, but they don't take a next step into Heaven and have quite the same experiences.

So you see, perhaps DMT is like strapping a huge satellite dish to your TV and boosting your signal to the next dimension. It amplifies the signal. So perhaps the hallucinations and experiences caused by taking a dose of DMT are more than just the mechanical workings of the brain, perhaps they are causing you to commune with your soul a little more clearly.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps the NDE is completely explained by DMT and the Monists are right.

However, there is one big flaw in the modern scientific understanding of the effect. Modern science says that everything about life, whether human or toad or bacteria, is dictated by evolution by natural selection. I'm not going to go into depth about evolution, as it does exist and the conflict about it are so often simple misunderstandings. For instance, evolution by natural selection absolutely takes place, it can be measured easily in organisms with short-lifespans where an experiment can bring about tremendous change in only a few dozen generations. It's hard to see the effects happen to people because we only live a single human generation and can't experiment or see the results of natural experiments without digging into the past. What many people take issue with is the origin of life, which is a separate issue from evolution. And I don't need to get into a big thing about abiogenesis (life from non-life, or origin of life) or a debate about evolution. But I will say enough to be able to point out the flaw.

Evolution says that through random mutation and sexual reproduction, each organism is given a certain set of characteristics and traits and that over-time, favorable adaptations will tend to live on, while less favorable ones will die out. For example, if you have two children who are otherwise identical, and one of the two has a mutation that causes him to have poor eyesight, while the other has good eyesight, then the child with good eyesight has a better chance of surviving, avoiding predators, being able to see and find prey that's farther away, and thus ultimately a better chance of living to a reproductive age, a better chance of attracting a mate (with better hunting skills), and a better chance of providing for the mate and their offspring. The poor-sighted son might very well live long, might avoid predators, might even be a good hunter and might have five children. But if he then takes a wrong step and falls off a cliff because of his poor sight, leaving five young kids with a now single mother, those kids are now less likely to survive to adulthood because of their lack of a providing father.

Often people wrongly think that Evolution says that the end-all-be-all of existence is procreation. It's not. Sometimes men will say that they're genetically programmed to sleep around and impregnate lots of women because the more kids they have the more their genes go on. This is a misunderstanding. If you go around and impregnate 10 females with 10 kids, but abandon the females and each one has to try to raise their child alone, it's quite likely that only perhaps 1 or 2 of those children will actually reach adulthood and be able to procreate themselves. Meanwhile, if a male stays put with a single female and they work together to raise five children, it's true that the monogamous male only produces 5 children instead of 10, but by working with his mate he can ensure that perhaps 3 or 4 of those children make it to adulthood and are able to have children themselves and advance the original father's genes. So as you can see, evolution is not simply about having the most babies...it's more like trying to have the most grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

So evolution goes beyond just having the most sex. For example. Suppose that you had a gene that allowed you to live to be 200 years old, though you were only able to procreate into your fifties before becoming sterile. From the age of 51 to 200, you are unable to procreate, but hey you can provide for your children and grandchildren right? Well, perhaps you become a burden, being another mouth to feed, a slowing, fragile old relic that slows down the group. Imagine if we still had all our great-great-grand-parents around. It's actually often advantageous for your genes for you to not live all that long. By dying, we get out of the way and allow our children to move on and not have to provide for us and perhaps that means they can have an extra child with the extra food. This is why evolution doesn't produce beings that live for thousands of years. It's not advantageous to the advancement of your genes for you to live really long.

So, when it comes to the NDE producing DMT in the Pineal Gland... how could it possibly work? How could it evolve?

Let's look at another example. Let's say there's a mutation in your genes that allows you to uniquely be able to read faster than anyone else. Then this would give you a leg-up in school and college, being able to do homework faster, understand more with the same amount of time, it would be beneficial, right? Well what if you were born 100,000 years ago, before writing existed? Then the fact that you had eyes capable of reading quicker and understanding more will be of absolutely no use to you. So you will have no advantage over anyone because of this gene and thus the gene will not do you any good and will probably die out before long. See, a gene has to actually do some good for it to be selected. Let's say you have a mutation that makes you grow twice as much muscle as a normal person. Sounds great right? Well, not so fast...we don't have a lot of double-muscled people walking around...there's probably a catch. Perhaps all that extra muscle gives you a better ability to survive in a fight or to wrestle a bear, but perhaps having all that extra muscle also means that you have to eat a lot more to fuel your muscles, and perhaps all that extra eating means that in a time of famine you'll be the first to starve. Or perhaps you end up having to hunt twice as often and are more likely to be hurt or killed during the dangerous hunt. Or perhaps the extra muscle makes you more likely to tear a tendon or break a bone in a time when such an injury could be lethal. This is why evolution doesn't just produce super-tall, super-muscular, long-living, mega-humans.

Perhaps you are born with a mutation that gives your Pineal Gland a new job. It had been there to be the internal clock, telling you when to sleep or wake and told your distant ancestors when to hibernate. Your mutated Pineal Gland now releases a drug when it senses you are in a very traumatic situation that causes time to slow down, giving you a Matrix-like bullet-time ability to think very fast and see the world seem to move in slow motion. So now, whenever you're in extreme danger, you get an almost Super-Power of being able to, like Neo in The Matrix, react super fast and you're more likely to escape from danger because of this, and thus you're more likely to live on to procreate. Your kids all have this same ability, giving them an edge on their peers who don't get a bullet-time superpower when something bad happens. Within a few generations, your bullet-time gene has spread through the gene pool and your whole tribe now has it.

Now many generations later, your great-great-great-great-grandson is born with a mutation of that gene. Now in addition to the time-slowing ability in the event of extreme danger, his Pineal Gland has added a new trick. If he is about to die, his Pineal Gland floods him with DMT, giving him hallucinations and feelings of love and it enables him to die peacefully instead of in intense fear. That's all well and good for him, not having to go through his final moments in pain and fear. . . but that doesn't then give him any benefit in terms of reproduction, does it? How could it? Being able to have a more comfortable death in no way makes you more likely to have kids or your kids more likely to have kids. So what could explain it? How could we possibly evolve something so utterly amazing and yet completely useless in the eyes of evolution.

To some, this mystery shows the “design” of the human body, that this isn't an accident, but is designed by God.

I've asked friends of mine about this mystery and the prevailing answer is something like, “We don't yet understand it, but this is probably a side-effect of something that is advantageous in some other way and we don't yet understand how those things work together, but within a generation, we'll probably have it figured out.”

And you know what... I tend to agree. I bet in a generation or two, we will have a mechanistic explanation that shows how such a seemingly useless adaptation could occur.

Some religious folks I know will point to this effect and say that it shows design and that God is looking out for us in the making of our bodies. It's just so perfect, that we would happen to evolve a reproductively useless but immensely helpful ability to pass into death peacefully. It's a miracle that we have such an ability, showing that somebody is looking out for us.

But I would point out that many of the effects of the NDE are simply relief from things which we don't have to experience. For example, it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective to feel pain. If it hurts to physically damage your hand by putting it in fire, then you won't do that again. You learn from it, you try to avoid things that cause you pain, thus you end up avoiding damaging your body. But, that only explains acute pain, that is, momentary pain of doing damage. What about chronic pain? What possible help could it be to feel chronic, debilitating back pain that keeps you from being able to ever be comfortable? As a doctor, I see many patients for whom simply having constant chronic pain relieved would be miraculous, and yet it's difficult to accomplish, because the body just insists on making their lives a living Hell. Surely if a designer is looking out for us in our final moments, It could be looking out for us in our final years too? Which is worse, thirty seconds of terror and pain during death, or ten years of chronic debilitating pain? Give me the awful death and the good decade please.

Chapter 5 : My Death

The day before my 45th birthday, I was with my wife at a hardware store. Of all things, we were there to get a new ceiling fan for our daughter's bedroom. The previous one had broken when she had jumped up on her bed and grabbed one of the blades like it was gymnastics equipment. She somehow thought the blade would hold her and she was in for a surprise. Luckily she landed back on her bed, fan blade in hand. Instead of a relaxing birthday weekend, there we were at the hardware store, which for legal reasons I can't name.

Thus began my journey to Hell.

I remember standing in the aisle, gazing up at a dozen ceiling fans, many of them spinning away, I felt dizzy, then my eyelids grew heavy. I tried to reach out to my wife for balance and say “Something's wrong,” but my hand missed her arm and my words came out as nothing more than a strange mumble. I felt my legs weaken, and then I fell backwards. I wanted to put my hands behind me to brace my fall, but my brain and my hands weren't on speaking terms at that moment, and so I fell unobstructed, landing on my back and whipping my head into the concrete. I don't remember hitting the ground, but my wife does. She says the sound of my head hitting the concrete was the worst sound she'd heard in her life. She claims she could actually hear bones in my skull “pop,” as they were broken.

An ambulance came, the EMTs found blood pooling under my head and my wife tried to tell them that something was wrong before the fall, that I didn't simply fall, but that I was perhaps having a stroke.

At the hospital, they scanned my brain and found evidence of a stroke, caused by a blood clot leading to the vessel bursting. This is a Thrombotic Stroke, and mine occurred in a very bad spot. When you break a blood vessel there are several effects. First, there's the internal bleeding, all that blood pumped into a place with nowhere to go. In the brain, internal bleeding can be very damaging as the brain “floats” in the skull. Adding lots of fluid increases the pressure everywhere, compressing the brain and causing damage and other side-effects. Secondly, all the places in the brain downstream from the burst vessel are no longer receiving the blood they need, and thus those brain cells aren't getting the oxygen they need to live and start dying. My stroke occurred in a main artery entering the brain, which meant that a large section of my brain was cut-off from the supply of oxygen. This is what caused me to so quickly experience so many different symptoms.

They operated quickly to remove the blood clot and repair the artery. This was however complicated by the fractured skull and brain trauma caused by my fall.

Once the artery was fixed, they picked up the pieces of the shattered back of my skull, doing what they could. They could not do everything they needed to however and left some of the damage to be repaired in a later surgery.

With all of the internal bleeding I was suffering from the stroke, and then the swelling of my brain from the fall, my whole brain was at risk of being crushed inside my skull.

In many traumatic brain injuries, a patient will have what's called a “Lucid Interval.” That is, they'll hit their head hard, say in a car accident, or falling on their back, or being hit by a baseball going a hundred miles per hour. The impact will daze or even knock them unconscious. They will then come to and feel okay for minutes or perhaps hours. They go on with their lives, not knowing that blood is pooling into a hematoma and their brain is swelling and before long, the intra-cranial pressure will start to damage brain tissue. Then they often suffer a seizure, go unconscious, and never wake up again. Many people fail to seek treatment during a lucid interval because they think they are okay despite suffering a blow to the head. This is one reason why concussions have to be treated so cautiously. We don't have pain sensors in our brains. It's not like a knee injury in which you can feel if something is wrong. The first sign of brain damage is in the manifestation of brain damage, not pain.

With my stroke I had blood pooling in my brain, raising the intra-cranial pressure. Had I not fallen so hard, I probably would have died quite quickly from the pressure on my now selling brain. Ironically, hitting my head hard enough to crack my skull open actually might have saved my life by opening up a relief valve, if you will, that allowed my intra-cranial pressure to drop.

After the first surgery I was kept in a medically induced coma while they waited for brain swelling to go down. They did several scans of my brain to look at damage and brain activity. On my 45th birthday I was unconscious in an fMRI machine with a hole in the back of my skull. I still blame it on that stupid ceiling fan.

On day four, they operated a second time, having waited for my brain swelling to reduce. They repaired my skull fracture, which included digging out tiny bone fragments from the back of my brain. They kept me in the medically induced coma after this surgery and waited once more for swelling to go down. On the eighth day, they allowed me to slip out of the coma and wake up. However they couldn't know until I actually woke up whether I would survive. The eighth day came and went. On the ninth day they did more brain scans, looking for brain activity, and found basically none. This didn't mean I was incapacitated, or a “vegetable” as such patients are often called, but it certainly didn't look good.

On the morning of day ten, I woke up. I tried to sit up, but couldn't move. I tried to turn my head but it was fixed in place. I swiveled my eyes around and discovered my wife asleep in a small chair, looking more like a pretzel than my wife.

“What are you doing?” I asked her, not knowing where we were or why she was sitting so funny. But the words wouldn't come out of my mouth.

I was awake but unable to move or speak for an hour before a doctor noticed my eyes were open. My wife jumped to her feet, the two of them loomed over me. They asked me questions, but I couldn't respond, couldn't move, couldn't do anything but move my eyes. The doctor asked me to blink my right eye if I could understand him. So I blinked. But I would later find out that I blinked my left eye.

Thus my long recovery began. I communicated by blinking for only a few hours. Then movement returned to my extremities. I was given a button in each hand, and I had just enough strength to press yes or no. Within a few days I was mumbling and scribbling on paper. Within a week I could just be understood if I whispered slowly. By the third week of recovery I was starting to get up and move around and nearly able to speak normally. After months of rehab, learning to walk again, learning to speak again, I was relatively back to normal.

Relatively.

I was back to about the same level of function as I had before the accident by my 46th birthday. My speech still to this day sounds a bit off, slurring a syllable here and there. I walk with a bit of a limp, but not that noticeable. And I struggle with small and delicate movements. But hey, I'm not a watchmaker, I don't need to be able to be delicate. Oh wait. I'm a doctor.

Luckily I've been able to keep working as a family doctor. I don't do any surgeries or anything like that. Mostly I just do check-ups and give advice. I no longer see people dying with regularity. Instead I get to watch kids grow up at their yearly check-ups, check out any weird bumps or lumps they might find (usually benign cysts), diagnose sprains and strains, and that's about it.

Not a terribly compelling story. I nearly died. But I didn't.

But.

Actually.

I did die.

My brain was dead for days. But I wasn't in my brain. And when I came back, I was no longer the same person, having been thoroughly changed by my journey.

Chapter 6 : The Journey Begins

I remember being next to a spinning ceiling fan, being scared by the whirring blades and trying to jump out of the way, only to travel right through them effortlessly. Then I looked down and saw my body on the concrete floor, catching glimpses of myself through the spinning blades of a fan.

I was decidedly out of my body and looking down on myself. I saw the EMTs arrive, I watched them work on me. Now perhaps this is just some false memory. Perhaps my medical knowledge allowed me to visualize something I didn't actually see.

But then I felt pulled down, toward the ground, through the concrete floor and somewhere below, like my soul was being pulled by gravity to the center of the Earth, my fall not being arrested by any physical material that might get in the way.

When people take the drug DMT, they experience flying or traveling in a tunnel, but at the end of the tunnel they often say is a flower, like a chrysanthemum. People having a Near-Death-Experience have a similar experience, but it's not some fractal pattern or a flower, but a brilliant white light at the end of the tunnel. I now believe that DMT is quite literally a gateway drug to the afterlife. It initiates the journey of the soul. For those bound for Heaven, the hallucination in the mind transitions into the metaphysical journey and that the tunnel itself is in their mind, but the light at the end of the tunnel is real. So those taking DMT but not dying also have a tunnel and feelings of euphoria, but there is no light at the end of that tunnel.

I didn't see a tunnel. It was more like a staircase, going down. It was like a stairway to a cellar. It was dark, creaky, dusty, narrow, steep, and seemed to go on for a long way. Every step into the darkness seemed to get me nowhere closer to the end. And then, when I thought the stairway would never end, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, a deep red glowing light.

I didn't feel euphoric. I didn't feel like I was flying. I felt full of dread. I was afraid. I didn't feel loved or welcomed. I slipped on the stairs and went flying down, tumbling, hitting my head several times, before tumbling to a stop face-first in thick mud. When I pulled myself out of the mud and looked up, I saw volcanoes erupting in the distance, pools of lava like ponds dotting the landscape. I saw hundreds of people walking around aimlessly, many of them missing limbs, stumps where their arms had been, bleeding profusely. As crazy as it might sound, my first reaction was to rush to one such person and try to stop the bleeding by applying a tourniquet to his arm. But the man shoved me away with his other hand and promptly fell into a pool of lava, erupting in fire and disappearing beneath the hardening crust. This is only the beginning of my voyage into Hell. . .

At this point, the visual cortex of my brain was traumatized, bleeding, swelling. Many parts of my brain weren't receiving oxygen. And when scanned, they'd find little to no brain activity. And yet, somewhere else, I was experiencing extremely clear visual phenomena. Some will write off my story as just hallucinations, drug-induced visions, nothing more. But then again, my brain wasn't really working. Besides, if we're going to blame all this on just a drug, DMT, then shouldn't the symptoms matter? I wasn't feeling euphoria or bliss or love or anything of the sort.

A doctor friend of mine wrote this all off as a “bad trip.” Like I dropped acid at a Death Metal concert and went mad. Perhaps he's right. Perhaps this is just a different reaction to the same drug.

Two years after my Near-Death-Experience I decided that I had to figure out if my whole journey was nothing but a bad trip.

My wife was firmly against this notion.

If I tried DMT and reacted badly, perhaps feeling dread, fear, doom, and so on, then it would show that my NDE was in fact a bad trip based on my body's different reaction to DMT. Being a skeptical person, I set out to test my hypothesis with an experiment. If I tried DMT and it was nothing like my NDE, then it would at least in some small way show that it wasn't simply a bad trip.

Whenever you take psychotropic drugs, you need to get to what the drug connoisseurs call a “positive head space” or a “safe mental state,” or something else like this. That's because taking a drug like LSD will cause you all kinds of hallucinations and visions, and if you are scared of the drug and in a frightened frame of mind, those hallucinations might take the form of scary things and cause you a bad trip. But if you're in a good loving state, then you simply enjoy the show.

I traveled to South America, I've been advised by my lawyer not to say exactly where or how I obtained DMT, but suffice it to say that you can find it without too much trouble. DMT is non-addictive and not one of those drugs that has a large black-market like marijuana, cocaine, or heroine, and so it's not a gangster and drug lord dominated market and it can be obtained quite easily and cheaply. At least, it was in my experience.

So when I went to take DMT, it was important that I be in the right frame of mind. But that was difficult to accomplish because a part of me expected to be sent right back down that staircase and back down to Hell when I ingested this drug. So I tried my best and then I took DMT.

It was amazing. It was eye-opening. And not just these two eyes. They call it “third-eye opening,” in that it seems to awaken your metaphysical eye onto the spiritual world. I felt oneness with everyone and everything. This was that heavenly experience people were talking about. I saw a tunnel and a deep purple glow at the end of it and I floated majestically toward it. I saw weird little elf-like creatures. It was all nonsense. Silly fun. I came down feeling amazing and loving and appreciative of nature and love and just wanting to hug my wife for days and days. She was immensely relieved that nothing bad happened to me. But she still couldn't understand why I had to try it. I had to know if it was all in my head. And my experiment seemed to confirm that it wasn't.

There was a flaw in this experiment. Perhaps I did too good of a job getting to a good mental space. I mean, when I had a Near-Death-Experience I had just had a very scary experience, and was in pain and dying. So perhaps my bad trip could be attributed to that. I decided I needed to try the DMT again, this time in a bad frame of mind, scared, frightened, and only then could I really see if the drug could cause the experience that I had.

Not many people set out to try to have a bad drug trip. That's where my skeptical mind took me.

“You want to do what?” My DMT source asked incredulously.

How does one try to have a bad trip? How do you scare yourself? If I am trying to scare myself, then I'll know it's all just a ruse. I needed to actually be scared. I couldn't simply pop in a horror movie and call myself horrified. I would have to go somewhere in my mind that I didn't want to go. . .

I walked into the hardware store in which I had my stroke and fall. I went to the ceiling fan aisle. It was the first time I'd been back to the store, let alone to the exact spot where my body suddenly and violently nearly killed me.

I took the DMT in the car right before I walked in. I can't tell you exactly what form it was in, where I got it, whether I smuggled it into the country or learned to make it, because of obvious legal reasons. Sometimes searching for truth causes you to do something illegal. So be it.

So I knew the DMT would be kicking in any moment now as I stepped into that aisle and felt my blood turn to ice. Chills down my spine. It was almost like being out-of-body again. Like I was standing over my own grave and looking down. There was a stain in the concrete floor where I had bled out of my fractured skull.

For a moment I forgot about the DMT. I was just in shock. This is where my life could have ended. I could have bled out right here in the ceiling fan aisle at a stupid hardware store. My body could be rotting in a box underground.

And that's when the drug kicked in. Suddenly I felt okay. I felt like death wasn't so big of a deal. So what? Death just means returning to something greater. Even though I'd been to Hell, here I was, okay with the idea of dying.

It was clear that DMT makes me feel euphoric and loving even when in a bad frame of mind.

So if my NDE wasn't caused by DMT, what caused it? And if my visual cortex was battered and bleeding, where was I receiving these visions from?

Chapter 7 : Was That Real?

After trying DMT for a second time and confirming that my NDE was not simply a bad trip or an adverse reaction to the drug, I had to confront a possible truth that I had been trying to dismiss.

Perhaps I really went to Hell?

All during recovery, I kept my voyage a secret, afraid of sounding crazy. Part of me thought it was just nonsense, the result of a coma. But part of me felt that it truly happened and wanted to change everything about how I see the world to fit this new vision. I didn't want to tell anyone about it for fear that they would see that I thought it was more than just a dream.

But with my experimentation done. . . I had to confront this belief.

Did I really go there?

I had been trying to forget about it but unable to. So now I returned to my memories and explored them more deeply, searching for meaning.

I was tortured in Hell. I never saw a devil with horns and a tail or anything like that, but there were weird looking creatures. I think they were basically human, but short, disfigured. All around were other people, other souls being tortured. This is the most vivid memory I have. Watching with terror as these creatures strapped me to a table and then took a hacksaw to my left ankle, sawing through it, through the bone, until they could rip my foot off.

I had tried to block some of the memories, but now I wanted to re-explore them and more of them came to me. I had to relive the whole experience in order to understand it. I could no longer suppress the memories. . .

Chapter 8 : Welcome to Hell

The summer I turned thirteen years old, I was playing baseball with friends in a field behind our neighborhood. It wasn't a real baseball field, just an undeveloped piece of land that was relatively flat and treeless there were so many dirt patches in the grass that you could say it was a dirt field with patches of grass. For the kids in my neighborhood, during the summer this was our Heaven. Every day there were games of baseball, football, dodge-ball, and many other made up games I've forgotten. But no soccer.

We'd head there around one in the afternoon and on good days there'd be fifteen kids, but even on bad days at least five or six would show up. This was of course pre-cellphone, pre-Facebook, pre-videogames, etc.

One day we were playing baseball. One kid in the neighborhood had a set of bases, they had metal spikes that you would drive into the ground to secure the bases in place so they didn't slide out from under you when you ran over them. We had all the bases with the exception of third base which was a skinny tree that made playing left-field a tricky job. Well on this one particular day, when I was thirteen, we were playing baseball and I was at the plate. The pitcher, Eddy, a boy that was a year younger than me but was often a pitcher because he had an amazing arm. It felt like he could throw 80 mph, but was probably more like 65 or 70. We didn't have an umpire, so we had to officiate ourselves, which actually worked fairly well. If you were tagged out while sliding into second, you would admit that you were out and not argue about it constantly, something that seems to be lost on the current generation of kids who think they are never out. Well Eddy had been up to bat just moments before and hit a ball hard to left field. I was playing left field, or left-center as we rarely had three outfielders. He hit the ball down the third base line and so I raced into left. I knew that if I was as quick as I could be, I might be able to make a spectacular diving catch. It's really the thirteen year old boy's dream. If I can make a great play on a hard-to-catch ball, I'm a wizard. If I fail, oh well, it was going to be really difficult to catch. Conversely, the boy's nightmare is a pop fly right at you that should be caught 100% of the time, because if you screw that up, you're an instant pariah.

Racing toward the line I prepared to make that great play, something worthy of SportsCenter, a catch that might go down in legend as the time that Xavier could have been mistaken for Willie Mays for just a moment. But as my teenage brain salivated at the thought, the ball clipped a branch way up high on the third-base tree, changing the direction of the ball, sending it more towards left-center. I was at a full sprint in the wrong direction and had only a moment to completely stop and go back to get it. I somehow managed to make a dead stop, sliding in the dirt, then took perhaps only two steps before diving, laying out, and catching the ball barely in the end of my glove. I raised the glove over my head to show that I had caught the ball, with my jaw probably still in the dirt, shocked that I had been able to compensate for the bounce.

But when I looked at the other boys, holding the ball high, I saw Eddy rounding first and heading to second. I fired the ball to a teammate, but too late to cover second. Eddy laughed, making fun of how I had just dove in the dirt and turned my clothes brown. “I caught it!” I insisted. “Then why'd you throw it to second,” Eddy protested.

Eddy maintained that I had trapped the ball when I knew I had caught it. There was one flaw in the self-officiating system we had. We could be taken advantage of by someone with less morals. Eddy wasn't going to give up his double and rather than argue, we would just go on with the game, after all, the score doesn't matter, so why bother arguing, just have some fun. But the fact that my legend-making catch had been turned into a punchline really infuriated me. Then on the next batter, Eddy easily scored, and walked backwards into home while sticking his tongue out at me and just being about a big of an ass as you could imagine. He was rubbing it in that he had lied and gotten his way.

The next half-inning, I was up to bat and Eddy was pitching. I was determined to show him up by hitting his stupid pitch so far across the field as to send it into the creek in the distance and cement myself as a legend. Eddy had other ideas. On his first pitch, I was ready to swing harder than I'd swung in my life, but instead I was met with a fastball high and tight, brushing me back off the plate. Eddy gave me one of those looks. I stared back at him and got ready to crush his next pitch. His next pitch again was inside, this time low, and I jumped backwards to avoid it. Everybody knew it was intentional. The argument last inning was certainly to blame and Eddy was trying to show me up as often the younger kids did to older kids when they sensed weakness. I had been bigger than him for years, but somehow in the last year he had sprouted and was now just as big as me and probably felt justified in giving me Hell.

His next pitch was a fastball that hit me in the jaw. I tried to jump out of the way, but it was so far inside, it might have actually gone behind me had I not moved.

In an instant, with my lip bleeding, I was charging the mound. I was more angry in that moment than I have probably ever been in my life. He didn't look scared or intimidated as I charged him, he looked like he was just waiting to hit me, wanting to. Things didn't quite go his way. I didn't get up there and land a technically brilliant punch or anything at all elegant. I ran at full speed and delivered a picture-perfect tackle, knocking him backwards, probably concussing him when I landed on top of him, and without hesitation I delivered a volley of punches to his face, breaking his nose, chipping two teeth, and breaking causing hairline fractures in three of my fingers. I was pulled off of him before I could stop on my own.

We weren't ever good friends after that. He became a lot more timid after that, didn't play sports in high school despite having a great arm, and whenever I've run into him since we always pretend like we're old friends but that moment always permeates every conversation we have even if nobody mentions it. I feel horrible about it. I beat this kid to shreds and he didn't deserve it, no kid does.

The first person I saw in Hell was Eddy. Not present-day-Eddy, but twelve year old Eddy wish a freshly broken nose, chipped teeth, blood covering his face, and looking like a scared little boy. I even flashed back to that moment, feeling my fists hitting his face in slow motion, feeling the teeth give way, feeling his nose crumble under my slow-mo punch. And it was adult me, immensely bigger and stronger, completely abusing this boy. It was a horrible feeling almost beyond explanation. You would have to go beat up a kid for no good reason to feel how bad it felt to re-live that memory.

That's the first thing I experienced in Hell.

It was the one action in my life that I felt the most guilt about. It was the worst sin I committed and I knew it, and I was being forced to relive the experience, forced to look the kid in the eyes, his red, crying eyes, and I couldn't stop myself, I had to do it. I went through that memory over and over and over, until I broke down crying. Weeping. In Hell, I fell to my knees, scraping them on the jagged volcanic rock, weeping my eyes out at the feet of Eddy.

In Hell, you have to answer for the sins you commit, and look into the eyes of the people you wronged. Maybe for a relatively decent person, this wouldn't be too bad an experience, but for the really bad people, it would be a form of torture. Even for me, it felt like torture. Having to feel myself go through the bad actions, reliving them, was like admitting that I was an awful person. Eddy wouldn't go away, following me around constantly.

Chapter 9 : We Make Our Own Hell

When I was forty years old, five years before my near-death-experience, I went on a business trip. There was a medical conference in Boston that I wanted to attend for a number of reasons, one of which was that a friend of mine was presenting his findings of his research on the effects of caffeine on liver disease. Spoiler alert: coffee is good for your liver in moderation.

Our daughter's second birthday happened to be the same week as the conference. I didn't want to miss the birthday, but my wife insisted that I go because I see our daughter all the time and the second birthday isn't exactly a can't-miss event. At that point in my marriage, we weren't exactly in the honeymoon phase. My wife had given birth, obviously, two years earlier. And in the mean-time, our sex life had ground to a complete halt. I understand, I'm a doctor, I know all the physical changes she's going through, not to mention the stress.

While at this conference in Boston, there were plenty of they called “anesthesia parties.” Really it was just meet-and-greets with some drinks. Doctor humor. You might imagine doctors as always serious, no-nonsense, people with gravitas. Well, that's because most doctors are acting when you see them in a professional capacity. They need that stern and instructive doctor voice or patients won't listen to them.

But trust me, take a couple of hundred overworked doctors and medical researchers who constantly work long and weird hours, many practically estranged from their spouses or significant others, and send them all to a week-long conference where they can relax and have a few drinks and the next thing you know it's like Animal House in there.

One doctor had copies of his hotel key made. You know those plastic cards? Like credit cards? He had the front desk make up copies for him. I don't know how many, but he had a handful. And one night at a mixer, or “Anesthesia Party,” which is just a euphemism for alcohol (I hope), he walked around chatting to women and after a minute or two, he'd give the woman a copy of his card and then move on. It's a numbers game, and I can't name names, but in the doctoring world, he's a bit of a minor celebrity. He's a guy we'd all heard of. I suppose a correlation would be if say you were at a party and Joe Biden showed up. Even if you hate the Democratic party or even the whole political system, you'd probably still have a star-struck moment of, “Hey! That's Joe Biden!” And this particular doctor really knew how to ride that wave of excitement.

I only know about this because more than one woman told me, with disdain, that he gave her a key-card to his room.

I was at the conference for four days. On the third day, I was at one of these mixers, talking to the anesthesiologist (bartender), when a conversation started up between me and a female researcher. I think she asked me if these conferences are always so rowdy.

“They are weirdly like a high school dance,” I said. “The male doctors on one side, the female researchers on the other.” The gender stereotype isn't so noticeable anymore, but it used to be that men tended to be doctors and women tended to stay in a more academic setting and become researchers (or nurses). I still think this trend continues, but much less noticeably.

We started talking. This woman, Sarah, was thirty. She was working on her dissertation and thought this conference was going to have several relevant presentations. “Underwhelmed,” she said over an Old-Fashioned. She was expecting a really academic environment, but found it to be way more like a frat party than she ever imagined. “I mean, I could have just read the report, I didn't need to see those presentations. I mean, Power-Point? I thought doctors were smarter than that.”

It happened without me even really thinking about it. We were flirting, and drinking. And for some reason, it didn't feel wrong. I don't want to say I did it because I had only had sex a handful of times in two years. That certainly plays a factor, but I was still in control of my actions.

Sarah knew I was married, but didn't care. So on the night that my wife was throwing a birthday party for our daughter and three of her closest toddler friends, I was in Boston having sex with a thirty-year-old PhD candidate.

It happened just that one time. I never cheated again. I felt bad about it after, but made excuses, rationalized it in my head. We've barely had sex in two years, it didn't mean anything, it was a one time thing, et al. I didn't run home to confess what I did. I just kept my mouth shut and it was a secret for years.

That was until I found myself in Hell with little Eddy, bleeding from his nose, following me around. Next Sarah appeared. And I was thrust against the window of that memory.

I was forced to re-live the experience. I was in the living room of my home, with my wife and my daughter, celebrating her second birthday, and right in front of them, right in my home, I had sex with Sarah. With my wife and daughter watching, staring, judging. Once more I was being forced to face up to what I had done.

It happened over and over. We'd finish, it would be over, and then it would start all over again, until I broke down crying again. It's hard to face up to your failures as a person, not being able to change the subject in your mind, not being able to ignore the judging faces of your loved ones staring at you.

I tried to run away, run from this scene, only to find that now Sarah was following me too. Little Eddy and Sarah, chasing after me.

Chapter 10 : All Apologies

There were more people I wronged. More mistakes made. I had to relive them all. One after another, then starting over and doing it all again. I wanted to crawl into a hole or jump into a volcanic lake. I wanted to die to get away. I had a large entourage now, every person I'd ever seriously wronged. There were more than I thought a person of my character should have. There was a patient I had nearly killed by prescribing a drug I should have known he was allergic to. I was lazy that day and he nearly died. And there he was in Hell, covered in rashes, coughing up blood and following my every move.

For some reason, he was the one that made the breakthrough. I couldn't take all of the people following me. After all the pain and depression and wanting to die, I started to get angry. Angry at myself. I grabbed the patient, I shook him, and I yelled at him. It was weird because I wasn't mad at him, I was mad at me. “I failed you. I nearly killed you because I didn't read your chart fully because I was bored. I felt like I knew everything, I glanced over it. I half-assed your health, and you nearly died because I couldn't be bothered to work hard. I wasn't too busy. I glanced over your chart, prescribed the drug that could have killed you, then I texted my wife about our dinner plans. I cared more about which Thai place we had for dinner than I did about which drug I used to treat you. I'm sorry.”

It goes on more than I care to re-write here. I mean, the apology might have been like that, but repeated ten more times, the same thing, over and over, for thirty minutes, continually apologizing, until I felt like I had completely lost it, I'd be in Hell forever having to face up to all these wrongs that I did, never able to forget them, never able to forgive myself, never able to be forgiven, as they didn't speak, simply following me around with hurt in their eyes.

I collapsed to the ground, bawling my eyes out. I cried a lot in Hell. It's really a form of psychological torture. I mean, if we made murderers in prison listen to every family member of the person they killed tell stories about how wonderful the person was and how awful their death was...that would be cruel and unusual punishment.

This is going to be my existence forever? I pounded my fists on the ground. I had broken psychologically. Why me? Why did I deserve this for all eternity? Because I got in a fight when I was a kid? Because I cheated on my wife one time? What was it that sent me here?

And then that patient, offered me his hand. He helped me to my feet and I could see the hurt disappearing from his eyes and some kind of resolve returning. His skin cleared up, and he looked good, he morphed into his twenty-year-old self.

“It's okay. I forgive you,” he said with a smile. He hugged me. And then he disappeared. Right out of my arms.

And then it hit me. This wasn't my existence for eternity. I wasn't doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over forever. This was my chance to atone for those sins. I had to make my peace with all of my mistakes, apologize to all my victims, ask forgiveness, and truly mean it. Only through fully losing myself into my apologies, only by truly empathizing, feeling like I wasn't the perpetrator but the victim and understanding the pain would I be able to move on.

I cried tears of joy. It was the happiest I've ever felt, realizing that I wasn't doomed to an eternity of this. I raced to little Eddy and apologized. But he stared up at me with tears in his eyes and blood on his face. I apologized again. Still nothing. I had to truly mean it. I hugged him, squeezing the little boy, and whispered in his ear, “everything will be okay,” over and over. And after some time, seemingly over an hour, he stepped back, no longer bleeding, life returning to his eyes, and he ran away from me, like a child playing with wonder. Then he vanished.

It would take me days to get through all of the entourage of victims. I don't know if I saved her for last or if it was the hardest one, but my wife and daughter and Sarah were all that were left. It was the hardest apology to make. I apologized to all of them. I talked to my two year old daughter for hours about why I had been doing those things with “not-mommy.” Hours of this absurd conversation, trying to explain apologize for infidelity to someone who doesn't have the first clue about sex. I apologized to my wife for hours, hugging, crying. I apologized to Sarah, but she didn't want it. She even told me she wasn't a victim. I didn't understand why she was still there. And then, it started again. My daughter was blowing out two birthday candles and I was having sex with Sarah on the dining room table as my family watched.

Maybe I couldn't apologize, couldn't atone for this sin because I had spent so much time rationalizing it to myself. I gave myself so many excuses. I'm a man, sometimes I just need sex. It was only one time. It didn't mean anything. It's not that bad. I had built up a wall in my mind around my guilt, blocking it. And now I had to tear down that wall in my mind and it was too well built. I couldn't break that wall. I believed my own lies too much.

It felt like I was stuck here for weeks. Weeks. Weeks of reliving this horror until I was numbed to it. And now that I was numbed to it, I felt like I couldn't connect to the pain anymore. Maybe my chance to atone was slipping away, the more I experienced it, the less I felt, the more I shut out all feelings. Maybe I would end up stuck in this loop forever, reliving this for eternity because I was too proud to admit how wrong I really was.

Just when I thought there could be no more progress, something happened. The scene changed and I found myself in my wife's shoes. I was with my daughter, and suddenly the party appeared, all her little friends, the other mothers and fathers, and I was hosting this party for our two-year-old. And then my wife appeared on the TV, having sex with her boss. Then she wasn't on the TV, but was right in the middle of the living room.

I couldn't empathize with how I had betrayed her until I felt what she felt. I broke down crying. I'm not afraid to admit that yes, I cried a lot in Hell. Hell is a place where you stand in front of everyone you know while they find out about all the shit you've done and then you cry your eyes out in front of them while they continue staring at you and judging.

I watched my wife have sex with her boss over and over and over. The sight disgusted me. But part of me thought it was fake. It was some trick to make me empathize. I knew she never had sex with him. She quit that job before our daughter was born and became a stay-at-home mom. She hadn't even seen him since before our daughter was born, so I couldn't believe it.

And then my wife got up, crawled toward me as I sat on the couch in our living room, covered in his sweat and dirtied in other ways I'd rather not mention, and started talking to me. It was vulgar. She told me all about an affair with her boss, how he did things for her sexually I couldn't do, and more vulgar and dirty things even worse than that. I told her I knew it wasn't true, but she insisted until I started to believe it.

It was a very dark and twisted time, lasting what felt like a month. A month of living like that. I can't stress just how long and awful it all was. But for our purposes I can summarize these very real, very traumatizing events with a few words and move on. We forgave each other, cried a lot, and then she vanished, everyone vanished, and I was finally alone in Hell.

While this was happening, the fMRI would show that both the language and visual centers of my brain were flat-lining.

Chapter 11 : Revelations

The first day that I could speak after waking up from my coma, I confessed to my wife that I had cheated on her, telling her the whole story. She didn't understand why I was telling her about it right then. If anything, in retrospect I can see how it might have been disingenuous to confess to a wrong while in such a state of weakness. It would certainly be hard for her to be angry at me in that moment. But that's what I chose to do with some of my first spoken words.

She was surprisingly okay with this revelation. At first, I thought this was because of my pathetic state. A few weeks later she confessed that she was surprisingly okay with my confession because she had a confession of her own, something that had been eating away at her conscience.

My wife had an affair. . . with her ex-boss. Which happened around the same time I cheated on her. Part of the reason I cheated on her was a lull in our sex life. And this was partly caused by her affair with her former boss.

I had a vision of her affair in Hell. I did not know about it, and yet I witnessed it. This might very well be proof that I wasn't merely having a nightmare. How could I have known about it? Then again, perhaps I had a suspicion, even if only some sub-conscious level, and that my dreaming mind was just postulating or guessing and it happened to stumble on some truth.

So after I realized that my visions from Hell might not just be bad dreams, I started to think more seriously about the idea that my experience wasn't imagined. What else did I discover there?

I set about to write down every little thing I could remember, searching my memories, hoping to gleam some kind of new information and get it all out before I lost the memories to the ether.

Were there more revelations? More truths that I discovered? My wife asked if I saw any people in Hell that were dead. In fact, I had. I saw my father in Hell. But I don't believe he was actually there, but that some representation of him was there because I had wronged him. It wasn't that my father was a permanent resident. I think that the Hell I saw was a Hell specific to me. We all make our own Hell, populated with our own sins. So unlike some who claim to go to Heaven and run into dead relatives or adult versions of miscarried fetuses, I don't believe I did run into anyone's soul.

However more revelations were to come from searching my memories.

I made an effort to remember everything I could and write it down. Years later, one of those scribbled visions would come up again.

I remembered a vision I had in Hell. I had many visions as my life repeatedly flashed before my eyes, or at least, the bad parts did. However there were a few visions that weren't memories. There was the vision of my wife and her ex-boss that turned out to be true. Then there was one more that I remembered and wrote down. I had a vision of my daughter, grown up, around fifteen years old, at that delicate time in a young-woman's life in which she began to question her parents and search for answers. In this vision, I saw my grown up daughter sitting down with a therapist and talking about being depressed and discussing how traumatized she had been by discovering that I had been unfaithful to her mother, calling into question her idea of who I am and what a man can be.

At the time I simply saw this as more salt in the wound, rubbing in the sin I committed. However, years after my Near-Death-Experience, my daughter indeed started going to therapy and confronted me after one such session to discuss my affair. Now of course, this could all just be a coincidence, secrets get out, but there was a detail to this memory that couldn't be ignored. I saw her in therapy as being shaken by the revelation that I cheated, but didn't know that her mother cheated also. So nearly a decade later, when my daughter confronted me about my affair, just like in my vision in Hell, she knew about my indiscretions but not my wife's.

I covered for my wife, once I realized that she knew only of my affair, I didn't justify or excuse my actions by further tainting my daughter's idea of our marriage, instead explaining my actions (not excusing them). I told my wife after the fact and she sat down with our daughter some time later to have a more frank and adult conversation that only a mother and her daughter can have about the reality behind the ideal world we often wish we lived in.

Chapter 12 : Which Sins Matter?

My memories of Hell are rather spotty at best. There are things I remember clearly, but for the most part I remember feelings, emotions, the people I saw and the expressions on their faces. I recall ash falling from a red sky that looked like a sunset on steroids. But a lot of details are missing. I feel as though my experience there was an emotional one more so than a physical one. The matter of moving from place to place is lost. Did I walk from one location to another? It seemed to progress more like a dream, suddenly shifting from one scene to another, one memory to another. So the Hell I recall doesn't seem like a true physical space at all. Which makes sense. If the soul isn't physical, why would it require a physical space to occupy?

I have come to understand the experience I had of re-living my “sins” as a cleansing of my conscience. That is, when you begin your after-life, you have baggage that you need to shed. You can think of this emotional baggage as weighing you down and preventing your “ascension.”

Before you go to Heaven you must be purified. And that is what Hell is for. It's a place where you confront your sins and then get forgiveness and ultimately you must forgive yourself. You can only do this by really confronting these memories, not by pretending they don't exist or just asking some religious figure to absolve you or reaffirming your faith through prayer or some ceremony.

So what can we learn from my experience? Which sins did I have to answer to? Were there supposed sins that didn't come up?

I was in a fight. I cheated on my wife. I unnecessarily put another man's life at risk through negligence. These are clear wrongs. I imagine if I had stolen anything, killed anyone, raped, or done anything so serious, they would have been there to confront me. But what about other “sins”?

I also was confronted by an ex-girlfriend. I dated her for several years when I was 20-23. We met in college and dated for several years. She was my first serious girlfriend. However, at the age of 23, having a break between my undergraduate education and starting med-school the following year, I had a year where I had little to fill the time. I drank a lot, partied with friends who were still in school, and grew very bored with being in a relationship. Part of me wanted to be having adventures, going out with lots of different girls, having one-night-stands, and all the sexual escapades that happen in your twenties. But I was in a serious relationship. It was a great relationship, and I loved her, but I felt too tied down and I dumped this amazing woman so I could be a single guy and mess around and have fun.

Even if you think it's the right thing to do, it's difficult to dump someone you love. Even if it turns out to be absolutely the right thing, it still hurts to deliver such a painful blow to someone you care deeply about. I then went to med-school in a different state, had another couple of relationships before ultimately finding my wife. I know that I was meant to be with my wife, even if we both cheated. Here we are, years after the revelation that we both had failings in our attempts to be faithful to each other, and our relationship is stronger than ever. And my first girlfriend is now happily married with three kids of her own. And yet, that broken-hearted 23-year-old girl was following me around in Hell with those big doe-eyes, begging me not to dump her. But I couldn't change the story, I had to keep dumping her over and over.

The presence of this ex-girlfriend calls into question what the sin was. If you think that all pre-marital sex is wrong and will send you to Hell, well I didn't see all the women with whom I had pre-marital sex. The only time sex itself seemed to be a wrong was when I cheated. So what was the wrong? Was it lust? Was it that I had lust in my heart for other women and this is what made dumping her so wrong? Was it that I should have been satisfied with her? But we're both happy now. So where's the damage?

When discussing this with an atheist friend, he wished that I had experimented with homosexuality so we could have seen if a gay act was wrong in and of itself. Sadly for those wishing to make this into a checklist of do's and don't for going to Heaven, I never did any such gay experimentation. I do however support gay rights, I voted to legalize gay marriage. I don't recall being in Hell and being forced to watch myself vote in favor of gay marriage over and over as if were a moral sin.

When talking to my wife, who has always been a Christian, she remarked that it was “funny” how my experience in Hell didn't alter any of my preconceived notions of right and wrong. That is, it's rather convenient that I didn't get to Hell and discover that I was wrong about anything. I didn't get there and receive torture for not being a true believer or not praying enough or being a skeptic. I wasn't punished for performing medical procedures that some faiths consider sacrilege. I wasn't punished for pre-marital sex that most faiths seem to condemn. I was only punished for things I already thought to be wrong. . .

So that presents a few possible scenarios:

A. It was all a dream or a nightmare and offers no insight into anything.

B. It was real and it just so happens that I'm right about what is objectively right and wrong. Pre-marital sex is okay, prescribing plan-B to teenage girls is okay (don't recall any zygotes following me around in Hell).

C. You are only punished in Hell for things you did that you thought were wrong.

I've come to believe that the answer is probably C. I believe that the purpose of Hell is to cleanse your conscience, and the only things on your conscience are the wrongs you believe you did. Hell is a preparation for your soul moving on to Heaven, and before you can go, you must get rid of your baggage. This is simultaneously comforting and appalling. On the one hand, it means that a gay person isn't going to get to Hell and be tortured for being gay, a soldier isn't going to be tortured for simply defending himself and his friends in the face of global forces conspiring to put them in harms way. On the other hand, if a serial killer thinks murder is okay, does that mean he won't have to own up to that sin? When Hitler got to Hell, did he only have to own up to the things he thought were wrong? Does he get a free pass on the Holocaust because he believed it to be a fair thing to do?

Or perhaps it's more complicated. Perhaps some sins are serious enough that you have to own up to them whether you thought you were right or wrong. So perhaps Hitler is still up there with millions of people following him around until he empathizes and asks forgiveness from each and every one. Perhaps abortion doctors do have to atone for every abortion they performed. I don't have the answer to these questions. But I can say that I was seemingly not punished for engaging in pre-marital sex, supporting gay rights, working on Sunday, eating unclean animals, wearing clothes of mixed fabrics, or any of the many things condemned in the Old Testament.

Chapter 13 : Vivisection

In cultures across the world, dating back for thousands of years, well before the emergence of Judaism or Christianity or Islam, there have been myths, folk stories, tales of other worlds, of Heaven and Hell. I have come to believe that Heaven and Hell are real and that the prevalence of these stories is due to the fact that occasionally, some people will come close to death and return to the world of the living to report their findings. Some people will go straight to Heaven and glimpse it briefly before coming back, while others will go to Hell and glimpse it briefly before returning.

This dichotomy of destinations leads ultimately to an understanding of the after-life being split. Some will go to the good place, some will go to the bad place. I think that these stories are only a piece of the puzzle. I believe that I can say that nobody goes to Hell permanently. I think that Hell is a place to cleanse you before you go to Heaven and that the only times people have witnessed it and come back to report what they saw, they've not stayed in Hell long enough to truly understand it.

At first, Hell is very clearly a bad place. Fire, ash falling from a red sky, the worst parts of your life flashing before your eyes, forced to relive your mistakes. And I haven't even gotten to the worst part yet.

After I atoned for my sins, after apologizing profusely, empathizing until my soul hurt, until finally my followers all vanished and I was alone, only then was I ready for the next step.

At first glance, the next step might seem awful. Four creatures, perhaps four feet tall, with lizard like scaly skin, horned skulls, and red eyes surrounded me and strapped be down to a table. They began by cutting off my left foot. It was slow. They took their time. There's no other way to say it: I was being tortured. They took their time, sawing slowly and deliberately for hours at a time. They'd slice into the skin on my back and pour acid over it. They'd push my face into molten lava. And the worst part was that my body would regenerate. My severed foot could grow back overnight, only to be cut off again in the morning. I know it sounds like torture. However, I came to understand it very differently. For days it was torture. It was awful. It hurt immensely. But after some time. . . it stopped hurting so much. The first time you see a part of your body severed and separate from you, it causes a deep psychological pain. But after the same foot has grown back and been cut off for the tenth time, it stops hurting. I stopped caring. Somehow it didn't seem to matter anymore. Pain dulled and then started to disappear completely. I didn't mind when they chopped my hand off and tossed it into lava. It wasn't real. What need do I have for a body part in the after-life? It transformed into a zen-like out-of-body experience in which I became like the Buddhist monks who doused themselves in gasoline and burned themselves alive to make a point. I realized that I was not my body and my body was not me. Pain is an illusion in the physical mind and the soul has no need for it or for the body.

I have come to believe that this looks like torture, at first it feels like torture, but it's not actually torture. It's really a process to make you let go of your physical body. It's a step in the transition between human being and spiritual being. First you shed your emotional baggage, then you shed your attachment to your physical body.

You have to divorce your soul from your physical self.

After days of torture, I was let go, released from the table, all my body parts regenerated. I was handed a machete by one of the lizard-creatures, and he left. Left me alone with a machete.

I realized what he wanted. He didn't speak, but I somehow knew what was up. I was supposed to cut off my own. body parts. I thought about cutting off each foot, then leg, then one arm, then the other. . . But then I realized it would all go much quicker if I simply cut off my own head. So I had to figure out how to lop off my own head in one smooth cut.

I wound up and swung the machete at my neck, cutting through my Adam's apple, but it bounced off my spine, getting lodged in the center of my neck. It took fifteen or so more hacks to finally break through and sever my own head. I tumbled to the ground, rolling away and coming to rest on my left cheek. I saw my body lying limply five or so feet away. I could still swivel my eyes about, move my mouth, lips, tongue, but that was it. One of the lizard-creatures came out from a cave, came toward my body, and he picked my lifeless body up, throwing it over his stout shoulder, and carried my away, towards a fresh batch of spreading lava, tossing my body in and it disappeared amidst flames and was then covered over by cooling and darkening rock.

The lizard looked to me, looked me in the eyes, and I understood. I was supposed to dispose of my own head. I had to somehow get my head to that lava.

I flapped my jaw, I pulled myself along by my tongue, and slowly made progress, inch by inch toward the glowing rock. I was nearly there, just a severed head up against a bank of molten lava. My hair caught fire and burned away as the heat grew more intense. I propped my head up, balanced on my lower jaw, and opened my mouth fast, flipping my head backwards and into the lava.

The heat enveloped me and the warm red rock swallowed me up, destroying my eyes, burning off my ears, and somewhere in a world that sounds like infinite pain, I felt embraced by love. A warm, glowing embrace of love.

I began to have visions, my life flashing before my eyes, but this time it was the good things, not the bad things. I saw those perfect moments, many of which were memories long forgotten. I remembered being a baby, an infant, being held by my mother when I was only days old. This happened as I flew up a spinning tunnel of white light.

I believe that I had been cleansed. I had shed my emotional baggage. I had let go of my material self. And now I was ready to break free and become a spirit bound for Heaven. . . And then I woke up.

Chapter 14 : The Inconvenient Implications

All of my experiences could have been an illusion. I must admit this possibility. I cannot claim that what I experienced is what happened in reality. Nobody can make such a claim, not even about mundane memories. We can't even really know that we are really experiencing what we think we are from moment to moment. So it's certainly possible that this was all a nightmare, the result of a stroke, a coma, a near-death-experience. If that's true, then there's not really any truth to gleam in this experience and it's just one more inaccurate memory of a hallucination that can't tell us anything about anything.

That's what the skeptic in me, the old me, wants to make sure we establish. Don't think that I have no doubts or can't understand criticism that my ideas receive.

However, my experiences have powerfully influenced who I am. It is undeniable that such an experience will change you, even if it was all a hallucination, it all seemed real to me. And so I do feel obligated to share my experience, if only to get these ideas out of my head. There is something within me that has made me sit down and tell my story and spread that information.

It took me some time before I told anyone about what I experienced. I first confided in my wife, who is a devout Christian and had no trouble believing me. She was appalled that I went to Hell and not Heaven, terrified really, thinking that perhaps her understanding was wrong. But then I explained to her in detail how I believe Hell to be a place that helps you in the transition to Heaven, and that ultimately that is probably everyone's destination. I can't know this for sure, as I only know of my experience, but I find it hard to believe that a God would want anyone to be punished for eternity for anything, and the fact that my time in Hell was short-lived leads me to believe that Hell is quite a bit more like the justice system we have on Earth, where more severe crimes are met with longer sentences. If anything, Hell is much more fair, in that your punishment isn't a set amount of time to be counted down, but rather lasts however long it lasts for you to shed all of your emotional baggage and atone for all of your sins.

My wife and I sat for hours and talked about all the possible implications. We researched Near-Death-Experiences, DMT, visions people have had across the world. We came to find, as I've said earlier, that people all over the world are pretty much in agreement about the afterlife. Some people see a Heaven. Those people see what they expected to see. Christians see Christ. Muslims see Muhammed. Then some people see Hell, and often this is a fiery, lava-filled, center-of-the-Earth, demon-filled kind of place. This is a common experience. I think that both places, Heaven and Hell, are transitional places that are places where we begin that journey to the spirit world. As such, we aren't going to actual real physical places that are the same for everyone, but instead, these places are somehow projecting our own imaginations back at us. We see what we expect to see.

After talking with my wife, she wanted to share my experience with many of her friends and people at our church (which I attended with her occasionally prior to my NDE, but not often and mostly to be with her, not because I believed). She would bring it up at dinner with friends or in her book club, and was surprised when our ideas were met with intense resistance. At first she thought one or two friends were just being difficult, but the more people we told, the harder the resistance became to ignore.

We came to the realization that people were reacting negatively to our ideas because they implied that the after-life is not governed by any one religion. We were saying that Heaven and Hell transcend Christianity and even pre-date it. This meant that Christianity and all major religions were basically wrong. They might all have some truth, some benefit, some insight into God or the after-life, but none of them agreed with what I was saying. One friend straight up told my wife that “You either go to Heaven or Hell, and you should dump your husband or else you'll end up in Hell with him, cause you know that's where he's going.”

Amongst my wife's friends, she was known for holding the most liberal views. We're for gay-marriage and gay rights. And my wife has been vocal in the Church about abandoning the condemnation of gays and embracing them instead. My wife would do research and find scholars who claim that the biblical quotations often used to condemn homosexuality are mis-translated or the context is poorly understood. Then she would point out that there is evidence that homosexuality is a physical trait and one doesn't choose to be gay. But her please for modernizing the church would go unheeded. After bringing up my NDE, one church goer said I was faking because, “Only an Agnostic would die and go to Hell and take that to mean that he's right about everything.”

While my wife embraced my journey and wanted to discuss it with others. I was reticent to tell any of my friends, who I know to be skeptical, mostly Atheist or Agnostic people.

One of the first things I had to re-learn when beginning rehab was that I could no longer tell left from right, and I learned by trial and error, leading a colleague to joke that when I died I went left when I was supposed to go right and ended up in the wrong place.

Some friends and colleagues disregard my experiences as purely imagined, despite the flat-line for my visual cortex during the ordeal, despite the coincidence of uncovering my wife's infidelity. I don't blame them. But I do wish they would be a little more open-minded in considering what it could mean rather than simply writing it off without considering the implications.

Chapter 15 : God Is Greater Than Religion

The real reason I originally became an Agnostic was that I could not wrap my head around Christianity. I had many problems with it, most stemming from the human manifestation of the church as a political power.

Let me explain the flaws I saw in Christianity, and then how my experience has morphed and erased these flaws. . .

1. A loving God shouldn't be incapable of forgiving someone of a sin, no matter how grave. In other words, I could not believe that a loving God would send anyone to Hell for eternity.

Now I understand that Hell is not an eternity, nor is it solely punishment.

2. A person born in India has a very small chance of being born into a Christian family. Some Christians say that all people are exposed to scripture and therefore have a chance to convert. But this seems extremely small-minded to me. The vast majority of people of all different faiths stay in the faith in which they were born into. Changing only very rarely or because of marriage. So this means that the faith you are born into is very likely to be the faith you settle on. Thus sending a person to Hell for being of the wrong religion seems to be punishing someone for the circumstance of their own birth, which seems profoundly unfair.

Now I understand that the different organized religions aren't necessary, which is a nice revelation. The alternative is to believe that a few billion Christians will go to Heaven while more billions of people will go to Hell, or that a few billion Muslims go to Heaven while more billions of non-Muslims go to Hell. I cannot fathom a universe in which the majority of living people are deemed worthy of Hell. Now I see that no one religion is the only path to Heaven, in fact you don't necessarily need any religion.

3. I can understand a God that judged you based on your actions, whether you try to be a good person. I can see the logic in sending killers and rapists to Hell, even if I find it to be exceedingly cruel. But sending a decent person to Hell for their beliefs alone seemed absurd to me. Why would it be that God would care most of all whether you believe in him? Why would a supernatural deity need to be believed in? This seems like the act of a petulant King that requires all peasants to acknowledge his power over them, not like the act of a loving deity. Why would belief be the ultimate factor?

Now I see that non-believers can go to Heaven and thus this is not a flaw with God, but a flaw in the logic of organized religions.

4. I can't believe in a God that is so sex-obsessed. At some Churches you might mistake God for the Sex Police. I can understand why some people oppose abortion so much, since it destroys living things, but why such vehement hatred of condoms or birth control? Why for instance, do religious conservative politicians who claim that they are trying to end abortion also fight to eliminate birth control, which prevents abortions? Why would God care that much about who you have sex with, what kinds of sex you have, and so on?

Now I see that God doesn't care and think that this is just a projection of human influence through the church.

With my new understanding, I have realized that all the flaws I saw in organized religion are exactly that, flaws in organized religion, not flaws in God or the Universe. In fact, I now understand all of the flaws. I used to ask, “Why would God do this?” and was baffled by the lack of logic. But instead, now I ask, “Why would Church leaders say this about God?” and find that this question almost always answers the dilemma.

Let me put it another way. Let's say that you wanted to start your own religion. You figure it would be a cushy job to be a Prophet. You claim to speak to God and then you get to tell other people what to do and collect a nice salary while you commune with the false God you invented in your head. I mean, as far as jobs go, this has to be a really cushy one. Please don't shut down your minds and get pre-emptively offended. Whichever religion you might belong to, imagine that I'm talking about another religion. You must believe that the religions to which you don't ascribe are invented around false gods and false prophets, so let's talk about them.

So there you are, ready to invent a false god and be a false prophet. First off, you need to convince people to believe you. If you say god spoke to you and that he said great things about love and happiness, people will just move on their merry way. Maybe they listen for a bit, but then they get bored. You need to really get their attention, so you decide that you need some kind of reward or motivation to get people to attend your church, so you say, “God told me that there is a perfect, beautiful, loving place where we go when we die and all our loved ones will be there, and we will live together in happiness. . . forever.” It's an amazing reward, something that will motivate people, and the beauty of it is that it's completely intangible. If you promise that coming to your church will make people's crops grow better, that might entice some, but what happens when a drought comes and you can't deliver? So you pick a reward that's not only great, but also can never be proven wrong. When your church-goers start dying off and don't go to the Heaven you made up, they don't come and ask for their money back or leave bad reviews on your church's website about your lies. This is the beauty of offering eternal rewards. . .they're both infinite and totally unfalsifiable.

So you tell people about these amazing rewards and some people will just say “Cool, thanks,” and move on their merry way because they think they're good people and will end up in Heaven. You need these people to come to your church, so then you add a stipulation, “Well, you only go there if you go to my place of worship and listen to me and do the little ceremonies and things that I tell you to do. Only then do you get this perfect after-life.”

Some people will be taken in by this offer of eternal bliss, but others will ignore you. They can doubt it all they want, but they can't prove it's not true. Still, some will say you're a con man and move along. So you need more people and you say, “Come on, join us at our next worship, what do you have to lose?” You don't mention that you collect some money from them, and what they have to lose is a little bit of money from their pockets every week until they die. So some come and like the service, others are still unconvinced.

So you think about how you can improve your sales pitch. “I'll tell them that if they don't believe, don't come to my church, then they not only don't get to go to Heaven, they go to Hell.” So you invent stories about a mythical place of torture and fire.

The next doubter comes along and you tell them that they better believe what you say or else they'll go to Hell. Some people will be scared by this and will believe. Those that aren't convinced can maybe be persuaded with “What do you have to lose? Say you're right and I'm making it up and there's no Heaven or Hell, then when you die nothing happens. But. . . If I'm right, and you don't believe, you get eternal damnation. And if you do believe you get eternal bliss. So you should just believe because it's not worth risking it and you don't have anything to lose by being wrong.”

This is called Pascal's Wager, and it's an argument often used to argue for a particular faith but is deeply flawed. I was presented with Pascal's Wager frequently when I was younger and openly Agnostic by many Christians. What they didn't seem to understand is that to a non-religious person, every single religion can use Pascal's Wager as a plea to join their faith. The Christian says, “If you're wrong, nothing happens when you die. But if I'm right, either Heaven or Hell, so why not believe, what do you have to lose?” This completely ignores the existence of other religions. What if I go with you and then become a Christian, and it turns out that one of the other hundred religions is actually the correct one? So It's not a simple dichotomy, and in fact only makes sense if belief is the ultimate test of your soul's destination. Add in the fact that believing as some kind of bet-hedging is disingenuous and wouldn't God know that?

It's clear to me that religions are motivated to claim they are the only path to Heaven in order to scare and persuade people into joining them, and that they've re-appropriated the deeply ingrained cultural concepts about the after-life in order to expand their influence.

Other non-believers come along and tell you, the false prophet, that if there is a god, he'll simply send good people to Heaven and bad people to Hell and that the church won't be necessary to get there, since judging people by their beliefs is silly. So you tell them. . . “That's not how god works. He does judge based on your beliefs, not just on your actions.”

To admit that the good go to Heaven and the bad go to Hell is to admit that your religion isn't necessary could be a fatal wound to your attempt at getting a cushy job as the prophet. After all, if good people go to Heaven, what do we need a prophet for?

So I find that belief being the test for Heaven is explained by people trying to again expand the influence of their church.

This belief-test presents more problems. What about people who live far away who've never heard of your faith? You can't judge someone for not believing in something when they've never even heard of it! So this creates a loop-hole and the God of the Checklists is born. “Well, if you've never heard about this god, then you are exempt and go to Heaven automatically,” you say, then you command your followers to spread the word of your faith to all the corners of the Earth.

But wait a minute...if the ignorant are exempt, why are you taking away their “get out of Hell free” card? Those missionaries are going to people that are bound for Heaven and telling them about God, which takes away their exemption and makes them Hell-eligible. So if you're proselytizing and you aren't a great storyteller, you've just sent a band of bored aboriginals on a path to eternal damnation. Thus religions are presented with a dilemma, either they condemn people who've never even heard of their faith, or they must invent a loophole that makes telling anyone new about the religion an act that paradoxically increases their chances of going to Hell.

So I stopped asking how God could construct such an illogical set of ideas, and instead realized that people who are trying to expand their influence are absolutely capable of and have motives to create such bad logic.

I've gotten around the first three problems I mentioned, but one more remains. Why would God be so sex-obsessed?

Again, I asked, “Why would church leaders be so sex-obsessed?” And I've found an answer. First off, when STDs are rampant and spread easily and accidental pregnancy is unavoidable, it makes sense to avoid sexual activity until you find your one and only partner and stay partners for life in order to ensure no spread of disease. This also enables you to wait until you have a partner for raising a child before pregnancy can occur. And it's clear that church leaders, who are often parents or closely allied with parents, are going to be motivated to try to influence the children to have better life outcomes. But here we are in the modern world with condoms and hormonal birth control pills and other means of preventing both pregnancy and the spread of disease. Now it's absolutely possible to engage in sexual activity with multiple partners without a serious risk of accidental pregnancy or the transmission of disease. Thus the practical concerns with sex have largely been erased, yet religions are sticking to their guns.

I believe that religions are concerned with spreading their power and influence. That is, fallible humans that are in charge would like to be richer, have more followers, more people paying into the pot, and more power. And that means telling a good story, offering the biggest rewards possible as well as the biggest punishments possible. But it also means encouraging the healthy growth of your numbers through reproduction.

Put it another way, if your faith says that all methods of birth control are banned by god, while a rival faith says that it's okay to use various methods to prevent pregnancy, then over time your faith will grow more. Your followers will have twelve children instead of four children. Within a few generations your church will increase five-fold while the rival faith will struggle to just double. Keep that up for a few generations and you'll conquer that faith through sheer numbers.

The same goes for other parts of the religion. If your faith offers a pretty good Heaven and a fairly bad Hell. . . but a rival faith offers an infinitely good Heaven and infinitely bad Hell, then their story will tend to convince more people, even if it's too good to be true.

Thus I find that the commonly held religious positions on the morality of certain actions can be traced back to the attempts of men to increase the power of the faith. If you say homosexuality is okay, then some of your gay followers will not only avoid having children, but will also avoid helping in raising any children. If instead you declare that all people must be heterosexual and must have children, then you ensure more people in your faith are going to have kids and more people will help raise kids and thus increase your number of followers faster than a rival religion or denomination that allows their gay followers to forgo child-rearing.

The aversion to birth control, a commonly held belief in Catholicism, is clearly understood by this reasoning, as is the ban on condoms in AIDS ridden Africa which has caused the deaths of perhaps millions of Africans who firmly believe, as the Catholic church has taught them, that condoms are worse than AIDS.

Here's another possible head scratcher that's frequently posed to me by people who disagree with me:

What about nuns, preachers, pastors, popes, cardinals, etc., why are they sworn to celibacy? Why aren't they commanded to have many children too? See, religion isn't just about producing as many kids as possible.

And I have a great answer. The church encourages all the members of the faith to have as many kids as possible (of course not all religions say this anymore), but then for the few people who are higher-ups in the church it tells them not to have any kids because . . . Kids want inheritance. By requiring celibacy it means that any material wealth that might be accumulated by a preacher or a cardinal or a nun will be transferred to the church upon their death, rather than inherited by any family member. Thus, this is a policy that clearly benefits the power of the religious institution.

I don't want anyone to think I'm picking on Christianity. I mean these criticisms to be broadly about organized religions, and only to point out that the facade created by fallible-humans seeking power is the source of the problems, not that these are flaws with God or the concept of Heaven and Hell.

For example, Islam has a fundamental split between Sunni and Shia. These two sects of Islam have been at odds with each other for centuries and account for much of the conflict in the Muslim world. The Iran-Iraq war and numerous civil wars and rampant terrorism can be understood as these two sects fighting for control.

So why do these two sects hate each other so much? What's the difference between these two forms of Islam. Ultimately the Sunni/Shia split occurred over a single issue. Once the split occurred, the two sects have drifted apart and have each evolved separately and so in present day they have many differences, but they are all traced back to the original split. So what issue caused this split that has created a Muslim world full of civil war and strife?

Inheritance. In Islam, there was a figure much like the Pope of Catholicism, a person who is considered a little be more than just human, and is in charge of the church. Upon the death or resignation of a Pope, the higher-ups in the Catholic church (the College of Cardinals) elect a new Pope. That is, they get together and pick a successor. Centuries ago, one such fight for the Muslim version of the Papacy erupted. Some Muslims claimed that the new leader could be anyone, whoever was elected. This would ensure the best person for the job would get it. However, there were others who insisted that the successor must be a descendant of Muhammed himself. Clearly this was a split that occurred because some descendants of Muhammed, who must have been wealthy and powerful people, wanted to ensure that their family would live on like Kings, keeping this throne in their bloodline, and thus the Sunnia/Shia split occurred simply because there were different groups of people trying to gain power for themselves.

No such controversy occurred in the Catholic church because Jesus left no bloodline. Unless of course you believe in some of the conspiracy theories that postulate that Jesus did leave a bloodline but that the church covered it up so as to keep power for themselves.

In Islam there is another controversy, this one centered around the “Satanic Verses.” Essentially, there are a few passages that were in the Qur’an but were later removed with the justification being that Mohammed was incorrect and that when he wrote those passages he was being tricked by Satan. Thus the name “Satanic Verses.” Some see this white-washing of the Qur’an as sacrilege. I mean, you don't get to edit what the prophet said, right? So they came up with a story about Satan misleading the prophet as justification to remove the passages. Why introduce such problematic logic into this situation? Why correct the prophet? What was in those verses that needed to go? Well, when Islam was in its infancy, as Mohammed tried to spread his new religion, he came upon a group of Meccan pagans who worshiped female goddess deities. Mohammed tried to convert them, but these pagans really liked their goddess deities and were resistant. So Mohammed included passages in the Qur’an which specifically mentions these Meccan goddesses as essentially a wink and a nod in the direction of the Meccan Pagans saying, “see, you don't need to give up your goddesses.” This is clearly a move by Mohammed to increase the power and influence of his new religion. Later, as the church grew much more, spreading across continents, running up against many other localized mythologies and gods, they couldn't keep incorporating all the minor deities as they went, especially not when they were trying so hard to sell a religion based on a single all-powerful god. Thus the inclusion of these Meccan Pagan goddesses became a problem and so the church leaders at a later date removed these passages, and claimed that Satan was just messing with Mohammed when he wrote them as justification to change them. The lesson here is clear: whatever action will increase the power of the church will become the morally correct action, even if it requires a Satan card to pull off the mental gymnastics required. So when a religion is young and just gaining traction, it will do one thing, and when it's grown much more powerful, it will do things differently and even if they need to make up a story about Satan deceiving their prophet, they'll make the change.

If you can come up with a seemingly illogical aspect of a major religion, or a modern controversy (gay acceptance, abortion, birth control, etc.) I believe behind nearly all of these issues is a decision that was clearly made by humans attempting to expand their influence and is not a flaw with God.

Chapter 16 : The Shrinking Church

My wife has gone to meetings of the leaders of her church for many years. The meetings can be attended by any parishioner and the topics are usually about the church itself. What new directions should they take? What charities should they be participating in? How to reach out to new members or make newcomers feel welcome, things of that nature.

A constant topic in these meetings my wife has constantly attended has been the problem of “youth retention.” That's what they say when they are referring to the alarming trend that young people are leaving the church in droves. This isn't a problem localized to this church or this denomination or this region or this nation. Young people are leaving the church in very very large numbers.

The number of people identifying as Atheist, Agnostic, or non-religious has grown dramatically in just the last ten years. As this younger generation that's widely abandoning organized religion starts to have children of their own, presumable raising their kids outside of church, this will lead to a whole new generation of non-religious people to whom Christianity is just as estranged as you might be to Islam.

So this trend is alarming to those in the church who see the attendance figures and realize that many if not most young people are giving up on church. A South Baptist Leader recently proclaimed that we have entered a “Post-Bible Belt America,” and that the “Moral Majority” is gone for good. Some see the problem and realize that the church has to adapt, must make changes in order to survive, or must embrace its increasingly shrinking role in society.

But you wouldn't think there was such a significant problem if you attended the meetings my wife attends. She says that when the “youth retention” problem comes up, it's almost always met with the following responses from silver-haired church-goers. “They'll come back when they finish college.” Not true, if it were true, the number of 18-24 year olds would be down, but the 24-30 year old range would be returning in droves after college, but the stats don't bear this out. “They'll come back when they have kids.” Again, the stats don't show this. You can look into the numbers, but it's much easier to just attend a service and listen to the silence in the church when the pastor is speaking with nary an infant crying nor a toddler fidgeting. It's quite clear that while there are a few kids here and there, the audience is quite old on average.

When they try to figure out what they could do to attract the younger people, the answers are always the same, “more music.” They think that jazzing up the church music will suddenly bring back the twenty-year-olds, after all, the kids like their rock music. All twenty-year-olds like Christian Rock, right?

I think I can tell you why the kids are abandoning religion in such numbers and at a faster rate than ever before. It's the internet. It used to be that you would only read a newspaper or two, get your news on TV, and mostly just talk to people around you. But with the internet, with Facebook, suddenly there are discussions popping up in all places. Today's youth is more exposed to argument and discussion than ever before, at the same time that they have more access to information than anyone has had in recorded history. So at a time when the church is synonymous with gay-bashing, it's not a huge surprise that young people are distancing themselves from organizations that preach hatred toward their friends and people they think are born gay.

You might hate this message. You might think homosexuality is the worst sin you can commit, but I'm telling you that in fifty years, if the church is still a powerful force, it will be a church that says being gay is okay, just as the church now isn't against interracial marriage anymore. The times change and those changes drive the church. And as I think I've established, the church will do whatever it can to stay in power, and that means beliefs are going to change. I guarantee that as homosexuality is more widely accepted, churches will more widely accept it. There will of course be some holdouts, just as there are still faiths that are holding out and waiting for this electricity fad to go away. But be prepared, because this change is coming.

My wife suggested to the church meeting that they change church policy to embrace rather than condemn homosexuals, after all, if it's so wrong, why would God make people that way? She was of course shouted down and the church instead went on with their policy of stating that homosexuality is wrong and instead hired a new band director to spice up the music and bring back the kids.

Aside from the homosexuality aspect of this, I think that the kids today are much more informed in the fields of philosophy and the history of religion, and they get into frequent discussions with their peers on social networking sites all the time. This process leads to these kids being exposed to the “flaws” in religion, some of which I've pointed out previously.

I think the real tragedy is that there is an after-life in which we are held accountable, there is a hopeful message to be heard about God and the loving nature of the universe which we will all eventually discover. But this message has been taken over by organized religions, and now that their flaws are being more widely discovered and discussed, the original message is being lost in the shuffle. Kids are throwing away God because they think the church is hypocritical. They see the hypocrisy of the Catholic church telling Africans that condoms are worse than AIDS while simultaneously covered up widespread child-rape by their members and they think that religion itself is hypocritical.

I believe that my message is a necessary one right now. I believe that young people should hear that there is a loving God and that they will answer for their sins, but without wrapping this message up in the power-hungry guise of organized religion which introduces things like a belief-test for entry into Heaven. Although, if things keep going as badly for churches as they're going right now, it won't be long before your local church is gay-friendly and moving closer to Deism or Agnosticism.

I think a lot of people see the hypocrisy in the church, they see the flaws in the logic that I saw as a kid, they see the greedy televangelists and the wealthy Catholic Church telling people to not value material things, and they come to realize that organized religions are fallible human constructs that often cause real harm like gay-conversion therapy or opposition to science and so they abandon the church and abandon their faith. Without faith, I think many are left aimless, suffering from depression, and lacking outlets to turn to for guidance as they no longer trust religious authority figures.

Imagine instead a church which was based on the ideas I've outlined in this book. Imagine a church that says you can go to Heaven regardless of what you believe, that you do answer for your sins, but that nobody deserves eternal damnation, that you answer for the things you yourself knew to be wrong, that you aren't judged for who you are, that ultimately God loves you and that we all end up in Heaven eventually, and doesn't then tell you how to live your life, doesn't give you a checklist to live by that was drawn up by power-hungry men, and that gives people that community and that source of inspiration, that outlet for soul searching, or that shoulder to cry on, a real support structure that's sorely lacking for those who leave the church completely and no longer have that community center that the church was for previous generations.

I'm advocating for a church without the dogma. A religion without the religious institution. A place that acknowledges that we don't have all the answers, that we don't know what God is thinking.

At least here we don't advocate the death penalty for apostasy. I told my wife to suggest that next time the youth retention problem comes up, but she just rolled her eyes at me.

Chapter 17 : Final Thoughts

I always refer to my wife in this book as “my wife,” because she doesn't want to attract attention to us. I have used a pen name for this book. There's the confession of marital infidelity that neither of us would really wish be attributed to us directly. There will of course be people who know us who may hear of this book and connect the dots and realize that I am the ghost writer of this book.

In addition to not wishing to expose vulnerable parts of our lives, we also don't want to attract attention to ourselves personally. I'm sure I could quit my job and instead go on the road doing bookstore signings, reading at church groups, promoting my book and selling my story. I might even be able to parlay this story into minor celebrity status, going on talk shows, radio shows, and so on. But I really don't want to for many reasons.

Many of the ideas in this book could be considered adversarial to some people of very devout faith who might wish to exact retribution. Salman Rushdie, a novelist, wrote a novel about the Satanic Verses and some in the Muslim world called for his head. He was so overcome with death threats that he was forced to physically move and to alter his lifestyle dramatically to avoid being beheaded by offended Muslims. I certainly don't want any such retribution aimed at myself or my wife or my daughter who has also remained nameless in this text. I could have used fake names (which I did for some people who appear in more minor roles) but for those closest to me, fake names felt disingenuous.

I know that the ideas in this book aren't going to be the most popular or acceptable, and that I could probably zoom straight to the top of the best-seller lists if I changed my story to be one that confirms everything that mainstream America wants to hear, but I'm not telling this story to make money.

Ultimately I'm telling this story because I want to spread my message and I want to start a discussion. I'm sure there's things in this book with which you disagree. There are things in here that my skeptical non-religious friends will agree with, which many religious folks will disagree with, and the reverse is probably true. This is the territory I find myself in as a skeptic, former-Agnostic, turned believer in a unique brand of theism. There are few people who completely agree with me, but agreement is boring. It's in disagreements where we discover truths.

I just hope that if you've read all the way through that I've at least given you a stimulating read that's sparked thoughts of your own.

My E-mail address is DoctorXavierKR@Gmail.com and unless this book somehow inspires hundreds of people a day to write me, I plan on responding to any responses I might get. So feel free to send me any questions or comments or criticisms at that address and I promise I will probably read it and respond if I'm not too busy or too flooded with comments.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 : Questions of Faith

Chapter 2 : Hell & Lawyers

Chapter 3 : Mortality

Chapter 4 : This is Your Brain on Death

Chapter 5 : My Death

Chapter 6 : The Journey Begins

Chapter 7 : Was That Real?

Chapter 8 : Welcome to Hell

Chapter 9 : We Make Our Own Hell

Chapter 10 : All Apologies

Chapter 11 : Revelations

Chapter 12 : Which Sins Matter?

Chapter 13 : Vivisection

Chapter 14 : The Inconvenient Implications

Chapter 15 : God Is Greater Than Religion

Chapter 16 : The Shrinking Church

Chapter 17 : Final Thoughts